Related papers: The mixing time of the Thorp shuffle
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we continue the study of a prequel paper on the pile shuffle and its capabilities as a sorting device. We study two sort feasibility problems of…
We reconsider a recently published algorithm (Dalkilic et al.) for merging lists by way of the perfect shuffle. The original publication gave only experimental results which, although consistent with linear execution time on the samples…
The paper presents a simple, linear time, in-place algorithm for performing a 2-way in-shuffle which can be used with little modification for certain other k-way shuffles.
We give the first polynomial upper bound on the mixing time of the edge-flip Markov chain for unbiased dyadic tilings, resolving an open problem originally posed by Janson, Randall, and Spencer in 2002. A dyadic tiling of size n is a tiling…
Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
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…
We study a family of shuffling operators on the symmetric group $S_n$, which includes the top-to-random shuffle. The general shuffling scheme consists of removing one card at a time from the deck (according to some probability distribution)…
The Matrix Torsion Problem (MTP) is: given a square matrix M with rational entries, decide whether two distinct powers of M are equal. It has been shown by Cassaigne and the author that the MTP reduces to the Matrix Power Problem (MPP) in…
We study the complexity of computing the mixed-integer hull $\operatorname{conv}(P\cap\mathbb{Z}^n\times\mathbb{R}^d)$ of a polyhedron $P$. Given an inequality description, with one integer variable, the mixed-integer hull can have…
We give a new algorithm to simplify a given triangulation with respect to a given curve. The simplification uses flips together with powers of Dehn twists in order to complete in polynomial time in the bit-size of the curve.
In this thesis we introduce a new type of card shuffle called the one-sided transposition shuffle. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a…
This paper studies a single-suit version of the card game War on a finite deck of cards. There are varying methods of how players put the cards that they win back into their hands, but we primarily consider randomly putting the cards back…
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…
We examine the mixing time for random walks on graphs. In particular we are interested on investigating graphs with bottlenecks. Furthermore, the cutoff phenomenon is examined.
Let $a$, $b$, and $n$ be integers with $0<a<b<n$. In a certain two-player probabilistic chip-collecting game, Alice tosses a coin to determine whether she collects $a$ chips or $b$ chips. If Alice collects $a$ chips, then Bob collects $b$…
We explore a new form of DFT, which we call the Polynomial Transform. It functions over finite fields, and a size $n$ transform takes $O(n)$ operations. In the multitape Turing machine model, it allows us to multiply two $n$ bit numbers in…
The mixing time of a graph is an important metric, which is not only useful in analyzing connectivity and expansion properties of the network, but also serves as a key parameter in designing efficient algorithms. We present an efficient…
The 2048 game involves tiles labeled with powers of two that can be merged to form bigger powers of two; variants of the same puzzle involve similar merges of other tile values. We analyze the maximum score achievable in these games by…
We study a variation of the combinatorial game of 2-pile Nim. Move as in 2-pile Nim but with the following constraint: Suppose the previous player has just removed say $x>0$ tokens from the shorter pile (either pile in case they have the…