Related papers: A Permutation Avoidance Game with Reverse Replies …
Recently, B\'ona and Smith defined strong pattern avoidance, saying that a permutation $\pi$ strongly avoids a pattern $\tau$ if $\pi$ and $\pi^2$ both avoid $\tau$. They conjectured that for every positive integer $k$, there is a…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
We consider the following combinatorial game: two players, Fast and Slow, claim $k$-element subsets of $[n]=\{1,2,...,n\}$ alternately, one at each turn, such that both players are allowed to pick sets that intersect all previously claimed…
We show that, by using multiplicative weights in a game-theoretic thought experiment (and an important convexity result on the composition of multiplicative weights with the relative entropy function), a symmetric bimatrix game (that is, a…
We study a robust optimal stopping problem with respect to a set $\cP$ of mutually singular probabilities. This can be interpreted as a zero-sum controller-stopper game in which the stopper is trying to maximize its pay-off while an adverse…
Permutation pattern-avoidance is a central concept of both enumerative and extremal combinatorics. In this paper we study the effect of permutation pattern-avoidance on the complexity of optimization problems. In the context of the dynamic…
Baker devised a technique to obtain approximation schemes for many optimization problems restricted to planar graphs; her technique was later extended to more general graph classes. In particular, using the Baker's technique and the minor…
Online learning algorithms that minimize regret provide strong guarantees in situations that involve repeatedly making decisions in an uncertain environment, e.g. a driver deciding what route to drive to work every day. While regret…
For permutations avoiding consecutive patterns from a given set, we present a combinatorial formula for the multiplicative inverse of the corresponding exponential generating function. The formula comes from homological algebra…
We present a generating function and a closed counting formula in two variables that enumerate a family of classes of permutations that avoid or contain an increasing pattern of length three and have a prescribed number of occurrences of…
We analyze the duration of the unbiased Avoider-Enforcer game for three basic positional games. All the games are played on the edges of the complete graph on $n$ vertices, and Avoider's goal is to keep his graph outerplanar, diamond-free…
We consider turn-based stochastic two-player games with a combination of a parity condition that must hold surely, that is in all possible outcomes, and of a parity condition that must hold almost-surely, that is with probability 1. The…
We consider a game in which a blindfolded player attempts to set $n$ counters lying on the vertices of a rotating regular $n$-gon table simultaneously to $0$. When the counters count$\pmod{m}$ we simplify the argument of Bar Yehuda, Etzion,…
The variation of a martingale $p_0^k=p_0,...,p_k$ of probabilities on a finite (or countable) set $X$ is denoted $V(p_0^k)$ and defined by $V(p_0^k)=E(\sum_{t=1}^k|p_t-p_{t-1}|_1)$. It is shown that $V(p_0^k)\leq \sqrt{2kH(p_0)}$, where…
We construct an injection from the set of permutations of length $n$ that contain exactly one copy of the decreasing pattern of length $k$ to the set of permutations of length $n+2$ that avoid that pattern. We then prove that the generating…
We study the maximum multiplicity $\mathcal{M}(k,n)$ of a simple transposition $s_k=(k \: k+1)$ in a reduced word for the longest permutation $w_0=n \: n-1 \: \cdots \: 2 \: 1$, a problem closely related to much previous work on sorting…
Neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Carefully chosen perturbations to real images, while imperceptible to humans, induce misclassification and threaten the reliability of deep learning systems in the wild. To…
In this paper, we study $(1 : b)$ Avoider-Enforcer games played on the edge set of the complete graph on $n$ vertices. For every constant $k\geq 3$ we analyse the $k$-star game, where Avoider tries to avoid claiming $k$ edges incident to…
The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to…
We study a variant of the synchronization game on finite deterministic automata. In this game, Alice chooses one input letter of an automaton $A$ on each of her moves while Bob may respond with an arbitrary finite word over the input…