Related papers: An analysis of a bounded resource search puzzle
We study a general smallest intersecting ball problem and its soft-margin variant in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces for input objects that are compact and convex. These two problems link and unify a series of fundamental problems in…
The $k$-center problem for a point set~$P$ asks for a collection of $k$ congruent balls (that is, balls of equal radius) that together cover all the points in $P$ and whose radius is minimized. The $k$-center problem with outliers is…
We study the smallest intersecting and enclosing ball problems in Euclidean spaces for input objects that are compact and convex. They link and unify many problems in computational geometry and machine learning. We show that both problems…
In recent years, crowdsourcing, aka human aided computation has emerged as an effective platform for solving problems that are considered complex for machines alone. Using human is time-consuming and costly due to monetary compensations.…
Balls-and-bins games have been a wildly successful tool for modeling load balancing problems. In this paper, we study a new scenario, which we call the ball recycling game, defined as follows: Throw m balls into n bins i.i.d. according to a…
Recent advances in bandit tools and techniques for sequential learning are steadily enabling new applications and are promising the resolution of a range of challenging related problems. We study the game tree search problem, where the goal…
We study quantum algorithms for spatial search on finite dimensional grids. Patel et al. and Falk have proposed algorithms based on a quantum walk without a coin, with different operators applied at even and odd steps. Until now, such…
We prove a few new lower bounds on the randomized competitive ratio for the $k$-server problem and other related problems, resolving some long-standing conjectures. In particular, for metrical task systems (MTS) we asympotically settle the…
Theoretical background is provided towards the mathematical foundation of the minimum enclosing ball problem. This problem concerns the determination of the unique spherical surface of smallest radius enclosing a given bounded set in the…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
A neat 1972 result of Pohl asserts that [3n/2]-2 comparisons are sufficient, and also necessary in the worst case, for finding both the minimum and the maximum of an n-element totally ordered set. The set is accessed via an oracle for…
This work explores the relationship between solution space and time complexity in the context of the $\textbf{P}$ vs. $\textbf{NP}$ problem, particularly through the lens of the sliding tile puzzle and root finding algorithms. We focus on…
We study the problems of covering or partitioning a polygon $P$ (possibly with holes) using a minimum number of small pieces, where a small piece is a connected sub-polygon contained in an axis-aligned unit square. For covering, we seek to…
The unrestricted block relocation problem is an important optimization problem encountered at terminals, where containers are stored in stacks. It consists in determining the minimum number of container moves so as to empty the considered…
We consider the allocation of $m$ balls into $n$ bins with incomplete information. In the classical Two-Choice process a ball first queries the load of two randomly chosen bins and is then placed in the least loaded bin. In our setting,…
Supporting top-k document retrieval queries on general text databases, that is, finding the k documents where a given pattern occurs most frequently, has become a topic of interest with practical applications. While the problem has been…
Clustering is a popular form of unsupervised learning for geometric data. Unfortunately, many clustering algorithms lead to cluster assignments that are hard to explain, partially because they depend on all the features of the data in a…
We consider the classical online scheduling problem P||C_{max} in which jobs are released over list and provide a nearly optimal online algorithm. More precisely, an online algorithm whose competitive ratio is at most (1+\epsilon) times…
Clustering is an important technique for identifying structural information in large-scale data analysis, where the underlying dataset may be too large to store. In many applications, recent data can provide more accurate information and…
Focusing on the optimization version of the random K-satisfiability problem, the MAX-K-SAT problem, we study the performance of the finite energy version of the Survey Propagation (SP) algorithm. We show that a simple (linear time)…