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We study the disproportionate version of the classical cake-cutting problem: how efficiently can we divide a cake, here $[0,1]$, among $n$ agents with different demands $\alpha_1, \alpha_2, \dots, \alpha_n$ summing to $1$? When all the…
An ordered triple $(s,p,n)$ is called admissible if there exist two different multisets $X=\{x_1,x_2,\dotsc,x_n\}$ and $Y=\{y_1,y_2,\dotsc,y_n\}$ such that $X$ and $Y$ share the same sum $s$, the same product $p$, and the same size $n$. We…
In this article I present results from a statistical study of prime numbers that shows a behaviour that is not compatible with the thesis that they are distributed randomly. The analysis is based on studying two arithmetical progressions…
Given a sequence of $N$ positive real numbers $\{a_1,a_2,..., a_N \}$, the number partitioning problem consists of partitioning them into two sets such that the absolute value of the difference of the sums of $a_j$ over the two sets is…
In this paper we formulate the problem of packing unequal rectangles/squares into a fixed size circular container as a mixed-integer nonlinear program. Here we pack rectangles so as to maximise some objective (e.g. maximise the number of…
We study the combinatorial pure exploration problem Best-Set in stochastic multi-armed bandits. In a Best-Set instance, we are given $n$ arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a family $\mathcal{F}$ of feasible subsets over the…
Given an appetizer bowl full of $N$ pistachios, what is the optimal size of the container -- neither too small, nor too big -- needed for accommodating the resulting $2N$ non-edible pistachio shells? Performing a simple experiment we find…
We consider generalizations of the classical secretary problem, also known as the problem of optimal choice, to posets where the only information we have is the size of the poset and the number of maximal elements. We show that, given this…
The Bin Packing Problem is one of the most important Combinatorial Optimization problems in optimization and has a lot of real-world applications. Many approximation algorithms have been presented for this problem because of its NP-hard…
We give a deterministic algorithm that very quickly proves the primality or compositeness of the integers N in a certain sequence, using an elliptic curve E/Q with complex multiplication by the ring of integers of Q(sqrt(-7)). The algorithm…
This paper describes a quantum algorithm for finding the maximum among N items. The classical method for the same problem takes O(N) steps because we need to compare two numbers in one step. This algorithm takes O(sqrt(N)) steps by…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
Ann likes oranges much more than apples; Bob likes apples much more than oranges. Tomorrow they will receive one fruit that will be an orange or an apple with equal probability. Giving one half to each agent is fair for each realization of…
This chapter delves into the realm of computational complexity, exploring the world of challenging combinatorial problems and their ties with statistical physics. Our exploration starts by delving deep into the foundations of combinatorial…
A necklace can be considered as a cyclic list of $n$ red and $n$ blue beads in an arbitrary order, and the goal is to fold it into two and find a large cross-free matching of pairs of beads of different colors. We give a counterexample for…
An accumulator is a bet that presents a rather unique payout structure, in that it combines multiple bets into a wager that can generate a total payout given by the multiplication of the individual odds of its parts. These potentially…
The symmetric binary perceptron ($\mathrm{SBP}_{\kappa}$) problem with parameter $\kappa : \mathbb{R}_{\geq1} \to [0,1]$ is an average-case search problem defined as follows: given a random Gaussian matrix $\mathbf{A} \sim…
For a positive integer $n$ let $\mathfrak{P}_n=\prod_{s_p(n)\ge p} p,$ where $p$ runs over all primes and $s_p(n)$ is the sum of the base $p$ digits of $n$. For all $n$ we prove that $\mathfrak{P}_n$ is divisible by all "small" primes with…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
The combinatorial discrepancy of arithmetic progressions inside $[N] := \{1, \ldots, N\}$ is the smallest integer $D$ for which $[N]$ can be colored with two colors so that any arithmetic progression in $[N]$ contains at most $D$ more…