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This report presents Giraffe, a chess engine that uses self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge, with minimal hand-crafted knowledge given by the programmer. Unlike previous attempts using machine learning only to perform…
Random walks on expander graphs were thoroughly studied, with the important motivation that, under some natural conditions, these walks mix quickly and provide an efficient method of sampling the vertices of a graph. Alon, Benjamini,…
The rate of convergence of simple random walk on the Heisenberg group over $Z/nZ$ with a standard generating set was determined by Bump et al [1,2]. We extend this result to random walks on the same groups with an arbitrary minimal…
We consider the following game. A deck with $m$ copies of each of $n$ distinct cards is shuffled in a perfectly random way. The Guesser sequentially guesses the card from top to bottom. After each guess, the Guesser is informed whether the…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
We study the game of go from a complex network perspective. We construct a directed network using a suitable definition of tactical moves including local patterns, and study this network for different datasets of professional tournaments…
We revisit the classic task of finding the shortest tour of $n$ points in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, for any fixed constant $d \geq 2$. We determine the optimal dependence on $\varepsilon$ in the running time of an algorithm that…
Prize-Collecting TSP is a variant of the traveling salesperson problem where one may drop vertices from the tour at the cost of vertex-dependent penalties. The quality of a solution is then measured by adding the length of the tour and the…
In a 1976 paper published in Science, Knuth presented an algorithm to sample (non-uniform) self-avoiding walks crossing a square of side k. From this sample, he constructed an estimator for the number of such walks. The quality of this…
Let $G$ be a connected graph of uniformly bounded degree. A $k$ non-backtracking random walk ($k$-NBRW) $(X_n)_{n =0}^{\infty}$ on $G$ evolves according to the following rule: Given $ (X_n)_{n =0}^{s}$, at time $s+1$ the walk picks at…
Consider an n by n array of cards shuffled in the following manner. An element x of the array is chosen uniformly at random; Then with probability 1/2 the rectangle of cards above and to the left of x is rotated 180 degrees, and with…
We present a randomized approximation algorithm for computing traveling salesperson tours in undirected regular graphs. Given an $n$-vertex, $k$-regular graph, the algorithm computes a tour of length at most $\left(1+\frac{7}{\ln…
In the classical paper of Dvoretzky-Erd\H{o}s, asymptotics for the expected value and the variance of the number of distinct sites visited by a Simple Symmetric Random Walk were calculated. Here, these results are generalized for Random…
We derive a general formula for computing the expected first return time of a random walk on a finite graph. Using this framework, we calculate the expected first return time in various settings over bounded rectangular grids with different…
We study the unit-demand capacitated vehicle routing problem in the random setting of the Euclidean plane. The objective is to visit $n$ random terminals in a square using a set of tours of minimum total length, such that each tour visits…
We investigate hide-and-seek games on complex networks using a random walk framework. Specifically, we investigate the efficiency of various degree-biased random walk search strategies to locate items that are randomly hidden on a subset of…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
Consider a random walk with a drift to the right on $\{0,\ldots,k\}$ where $k$ is random and geometrically distributed. We show that the tail $P[T>t]$ of the length $T$ of an excursion from $0$ decreases up to constants like $t^{-\varrho}$…
We propose a quantum heuristic algorithm to solve a traveling salesman problem by generalizing Grover search. Sufficient conditions are derived to greatly enhance the probability of finding the tours with extremal costs, reaching almost to…
Current chess rating systems update ratings incrementally and may not always accurately reflect a player's true strength at all times, especially for rapidly improving players or very rusty players. To overcome this, we explore a method to…