Related papers: Conway's napkin problem
We take up Dedekind's question ''Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?'' (''What are numbers, and would should they be?''), with the aim to describe the place that Conway's (Surreal) Numbers and Games take, or deserve to take, in the whole of…
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…
Hat problems have recently become a popular topic in combinatorics and discrete mathematics. These have been shown to be strongly related to coding theory, network coding, and auctions. We consider the following version of the hat game,…
Consider a population of customers each of which needs to decide independently when to arrive to a facility that provides a service during a fixed period of time, say a day. This is a common scenario in many service systems such as a bank,…
Mathematicians have long been fascinated by the resolution of algebraic and Diophantine equations in search of integer or rational solutions. This article presents a list of thirty-three open problems in number theory, posed in the 13th…
The hat guessing number of a graph is a parameter related to the hat guessing game for graphs introduced by Winkler. In this paper, we show that graphs of sufficiently large hat guessing number must contain arbitrary trees and arbitrarily…
Motivated by a problem on the 67th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, we will summarize three different solutions found on a website. This Putman problem is a special case of Sylvester's four point problem! Suppose four points…
We analyze a directed variation of the book embedding problem when the page partition is prespecified and the nodes on the spine must be in topological order (upward book embedding). Given a directed acyclic graph and a partition of its…
We present a new variant of the secretary problem. Let $A$ be a totally ordered set of $n$ \emph{applicants}. Given $P\subseteq A$ and $x\in A$, let $rr(P,x)=\vert\{z\in P \mid z\leq x\}\vert\mbox{ }$ be the \emph{relative rank of} $x$…
The abc conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in number theory, claims that three positive integers satisfying a+b=c cannot simultaneously have significant repetition among their prime factors; in particular, the product of the…
An assignment problem is the optimization problem of finding, in an m by n matrix of nonnegative real numbers, k entries, no two in the same row or column, such that their sum is minimal. Such an optimization problem is called a random…
A table of the families of alternating knots formed by conways is presented. The Conway's function is shown with the use of linear algebra in terms of natural numbers, called conways, that represent the number of crossings along a…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…
J.P. Levine showed that the Conway polynomial of a link is a product of two factors: one is the Conway polynomial of a knot which is obtained from the link by banding together the components; and the other is determined by the…
In 1960 R\'enyi in his Michigan State University lectures asked for the number of random queries necessary to recover a hidden bijective labeling of $n$ distinct objects. In each query one selects a random subset of labels and asks, which…
We show that, in John Conway's board game Phutball (or Philosopher's Football), it is NP-complete to determine whether the current player has a move that immediately wins the game. In contrast, the similar problems of determining whether…
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…
Chv\'{a}tal and Klincsek (1980) gave an $O(n^3)$-time algorithm for the problem of finding a maximum-cardinality convex subset of an arbitrary given set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane. This paper examines a generalization of the problem,…
At the end, the house always wins! This simple truth holds for all public games of chance. Nevertheless, since lotteries have existed, people have tried everything to give luck a helping hand. This article compares objective scientific…
We study a simple exchange market, introduced by Gourv\'{e}s, Lesca and Wilczynski (IJCAI-17), where every agent initially holds a single object. The agents have preferences over the objects, and two agents may swap their objects if they…