Related papers: Variations of a Coin-Removal Problem

Coin flipping is a cryptographic primitive in which two distrustful parties wish to generate a random bit in order to choose between two alternatives. This task is impossible to realize when it relies solely on the asynchronous exchange of…

We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…

The Sequential Multiple Knapsack Problem is a special case of Multiple knapsack problem in which the items sizes are divisible. A characterization of the optimal solutions of the problem and a description of the convex hull of all the…

Coin-flipping is a fundamental cryptographic task where a spatially separated Alice and Bob wish to generate a fair coin-flip over a communication channel. It is known that ideal coin-flipping is impossible in both classical and quantum…

We show how to hang a picture by wrapping rope around n nails, making a polynomial number of twists, such that the picture falls whenever any k out of the n nails get removed, and the picture remains hanging when fewer than k nails get…

We review the quantum version of a well known problem of cryptography called coin tossing (``flipping a coin via telephone''). It can be regarded as a game where two remote players (who distrust each other) tries to generate a uniformly…

We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…

We consider the problem of determining the minimum number of moves needed to solve a certain one-dimensional peg puzzle. Let N be a positive integer. The puzzle apparatus consists of a block with a single row of 2N+1 equally spaced holes…

In this paper, a new upper bound for the Multiple Knapsack Problem (MKP) is proposed, based on the idea of relaxing MKP to a {\em Bounded Sequential Multiple Knapsack Problem}, i.e., a multiple knapsack problem in which item sizes are…

This paper provides analysis to a generalized version of the coupon collector problem, in which the collector gets $d$ distinct coupons each run and she chooses the one that she has the least so far. On the asymptotic case when the number…

In the literature two notions of the word problem for a variety occur. A variety has a decidable word problem if every finitely presented algebra in the variety has a decidable word problem. It has a uniformly decidable word problem if…

ApSimon's Mints problem is a very difficult and often misunderstood counterfeit-coin puzzle. I explain the problem and suggest ways to approach it, while giving several fun exercises for the reader.

This paper is about the Coupon collector's problem. There are some coupons, or baseball cards, or other plastic knick-knacks that are put into bags of chips or under soda bottles, etc. A collector starts collecting these trinkets and wants…

Fake coin problems using balance scales to identify one fake coin and its type among n coins (n > 2) were solved by Dyson in 1946. Dyson gave adaptive solutions with the minimum number of weighings where later weighings may be dependent on…

The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…

We consider a generalisation of the classical coupon collector's problem, in which at each time step a collector either receives a new copy of a randomly chosen coupon, or loses all their previously collected copies of that coupon. We…

We consider Flipping Coins, a partizan version of the impartial game Turning Turtles, played on lines of coins. We show the values of this game are numbers, and these are found by first applying a reduction, then decomposing the position…

We consider a modification of Winkler's "dots and coins" problem, where we constrain the dots to lie on a square lattice in the plane. We construct packings of "coins" (closed unit disks) using motif patterns.

Binomial distributions capture the probabilities of `heads' outcomes when a (biased) coin is tossed multiple times. The coin may be identified with a distribution on the two-element set {0,1}, where the 1 outcome corresponds to `head'. One…

In this article, we study the problem of finding the longest common separable pattern between several permutations. We give a polynomial-time algorithm when the number of input permutations is fixed and show that the problem is NP-hard for…