Related papers: The Bottleneck Birthday Problem
The stable allocation problem is a many-to-many generalization of the well-known stable marriage problem, where we seek a bipartite assignment between, say, jobs (of varying sizes) and machines (of varying capacities) that is "stable" based…
The number partition problem is a well-known problem, which is one of 21 Karp's NP-complete problems \cite{karp}. The partition function is a boolean function that is equivalent to the number partition problem with number range restricted.…
The degree of a CSP instance is the maximum number of times that a variable may appear in the scope of constraints. We consider the approximate counting problem for Boolean CSPs with bounded-degree instances, for constraint languages…
In 1960 R\'enyi in his Michigan State University lectures asked for the number of random queries necessary to recover a hidden bijective labeling of $n$ distinct objects. In each query one selects a random subset of labels and asks, which…
We use partitions to provide some formulae for counting s-collisions and other events in various forms of the Birthday Problem.
Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform…
We introduce and examine the {\em Holiday Gathering Problem} which models the difficulty that couples have when trying to decide with which parents should they spend the holiday. Our goal is to schedule the family gatherings so that the…
This work deals with the probabilistic p-center problem, which aims at minimizing the expected maximum distance between any site with demand and its center, considering that each site has demand with a specific probability. The problem is…
Let $\mu$ be a $p$-dimensional vector, and let $\Sigma_1$ and $\Sigma_2$ be $p \times p$ positive definite covariance matrices. On being given random samples of sizes $N_1$ and $N_2$ from independent multivariate normal populations…
An assignment problem arises when there exists a set of tasks that must be allocated to a set of agents. The bottleneck assignment problem (BAP) has the objective of minimising the most costly allocation of a task to an agent. Under certain…
Initially proposed by Martin Gardner in the 1950s, the famous two-children problem is often presented as a paradox in probability theory. A relatively recent variant of this paradox states that, while in a two-children family for which at…
Consider the following statement: $B(t, \Delta t)$: a $t$ years old person NN will survive another $\Delta t$ years, where $t, \Delta t\in \mathbb{R}$ are nonnegative real numbers. We know only that NN is $t$ years old and nothing about the…
The title of the article is identical to the title of Chapter 21 in Gardner (2001): because we are going to analyze the probability calculations and the ambiguity of the problem statements. We will analyze 3 out of 4 problems from Gardner…
There are many advantages to use probability method for nonlinear system identification, such as the noises and outliers in the data set do not affect the probability models significantly; the input features can be extracted in probability…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
The last success problem is an optimal stopping problem that aims to maximize the probability of stopping on the last success in a sequence of independent $n$ Bernoulli trials. In the classical setting where complete information about the…
We propose a simple microscopic model for arching phenomena at bottlenecks. The dynamics of particles in front of a bottleneck is described by a one-dimensional stochastic cellular automaton on a semicircular geometry. The model reproduces…
Let $P$ be a set of at most $n$ points and let $R$ be a set of at most $n$ geometric ranges, such as for example disks or rectangles, where each $p \in P$ has an associated supply $s_{p} > 0$, and each $r \in R$ has an associated demand…
Let $p_n$ denote the probability that a random instance of the stable roommates problem of size $n$ admits a solution. We derive an explicit formula for $p_n$ and compute exact values of $p_n$ for $n\leq 12$.
The Plurality problem - introduced by Aigner \cite{A2004} - has many variants. In this article we deal with the following version: suppose we are given $n$ balls, each of them colored by one of three colors. A \textit{plurality ball} is one…