Related papers: An analysis of a bounded resource search puzzle
The minimum $k$-enclosing ball problem seeks the ball with smallest radius that contains at least~$k$ of~$m$ given points in a general $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. This problem is NP-hard. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm on the…
We illustrate how to invite and excite students about research by exploring higher-dimensional generalizations of the classical egg drop problem, in which the goal is to locate a critical breaking point using the fewest number of trials.…
In this work, we show the first worst-case to average-case reduction for the classical $k$-SUM problem. A $k$-SUM instance is a collection of $m$ integers, and the goal of the $k$-SUM problem is to find a subset of $k$ elements that sums to…
We consider the following balls-into-bins process with $n$ bins and $m$ balls: each ball is equipped with a mutually independent exponential clock of rate 1. Whenever a ball's clock rings, the ball samples a random bin and moves there if…
In this paper we deal with the restricted Block Relocation Problem. We present a new lower bound and a heuristic approach for the problem. The proposed lower bound can be computed in polynomial time and it is provably better than some…
We study a new search problem on the plane involving a robot and an immobile treasure, initially placed at distance $1$ from each other. The length $\beta$ of an arc (a fence) within the perimeter of the corresponding circle, as well as the…
The clustering problem has many applications in Machine Learning, Operations Research, and Statistics. We propose three algorithms to create starting solutions for improvement algorithms for this problem. We test the algorithms on 72…
Many practical search problems concern the search for multiple hidden objects or agents, such as earthquake survivors. In such problems, knowing only the list of possible locations, the Searcher needs to find all the hidden objects by…
The sliding window model of computation captures scenarios in which data is arriving continuously, but only the latest $w$ elements should be used for analysis. The goal is to design algorithms that update the solution efficiently with each…
In this paper we consider two metric covering/clustering problems - \textit{Minimum Cost Covering Problem} (MCC) and $k$-clustering. In the MCC problem, we are given two point sets $X$ (clients) and $Y$ (servers), and a metric on $X \cup…
The selection problem, where one wishes to locate the $k^{th}$ smallest element in an unsorted array of size $n$, is one of the basic problems studied in computer science. The main focus of this work is designing algorithms for solving the…
Algorithms for minimal enclosing ball problems are often geometric in nature. To highlight the metric ingredients underlying their efficiency, we focus here on a particularly simple geodesic-based method. A recent subgradient-based study…
We consider machine learning in a comparison-based setting where we are given a set of points in a metric space, but we have no access to the actual distances between the points. Instead, we can only ask an oracle whether the distance…
We consider the unbalanced allocation of $m$ balls into $n$ bins by a randomized algorithm using the "power of two choices". For each ball, we select a set of bins at random, then place the ball in the fullest bin within the set.…
We study a natural process for allocating m balls into n bins that are organized as the vertices of an undirected graph G. Balls arrive one at a time. When a ball arrives, it first chooses a vertex u in G uniformly at random. Then the ball…
This paper concerns the minimax center of a collection of linear subspaces. When the subspaces are $k$-dimensional subspaces of $\mathbb{R}^n$, this can be cast as finding the center of a minimum enclosing ball on a Grassmann manifold,…
We study the fundamental problem of approximate nearest neighbor search in $d$-dimensional Hamming space $\{0,1\}^d$. We study the complexity of the problem in the famous cell-probe model, a classic model for data structures. We consider…
We consider a deterministic game with alternate moves and complete information, of which the issue is always the victory of one of the two opponents. We assume that this game is the realization of a random model enjoying some independence…
We study parallel algorithms for the classical balls-into-bins problem, in which $m$ balls acting in parallel as separate agents are placed into $n$ bins. Algorithms operate in synchronous rounds, in each of which balls and bins exchange…
The k-d tree was one of the first spatial data structures proposed for nearest neighbor search. Its efficacy is diminished in high-dimensional spaces, but several variants, with randomization and overlapping cells, have proved to be…