Related papers: Frustration solitaire
In recent years many efforts have been devoted to finding bidiagonal factorizations of nonsingular totally positive matrices, since their accurate computation allows to numerically solve several important algebraic problems with great…
The reader is reminded of several puzzles involving randomness. These may be ill-posed, and if well-posed there is sometimes a solution that uses probabilistic intuition in a special way. Various examples are presented including the well…
These notes represent an extended version of a talk I gave for the participants of the IMO 2009 and other interested people. We introduce diophantine equations and show evidence that it can be hard to solve them. Then we demonstrate how one…
Chance-constrained problems involve stochastic components in the constraints which can be violated with a small probability. We investigate the impact of different types of chance constraints on the performance of iterative search…
Some old peg solitaire boards are brought down from the literature, dusted off, and re-examined, and some remarkable problems are displayed on them.
A wide range of constraints can be compactly specified using automata or formal languages. In a sequence of recent papers, we have shown that an effective means to reason with such specifications is to decompose them into primitive…
We introduce a lifting of West's stack-sorting map $s$ to partition diagrams, which are combinatorial objects indexing bases of partition algebras. Our lifting $\mathscr{S}$ of $s$ is such that $\mathscr{S}$ behaves in the same way as $s$…
Reasoning with defeasible and conflicting knowledge in an argumentative form is a key research field in computational argumentation. Reasoning under various forms of uncertainty is both a key feature and a challenging barrier for automated…
In this paper, we introduce a graph matching method that can account for constraints of arbitrary order, with arbitrary potential functions. Unlike previous decomposition approaches that rely on the graph structures, we introduce a…
The intractability of any problem and the randomness of its solutions have an obvious intuitive connection. However, the challenge till now has been that there is no practical way to firmly establish if the solution to a problem is actually…
We explore the fundamental problem of sorting through the lens of learning-augmented algorithms, where algorithms can leverage possibly erroneous predictions to improve their efficiency. We consider two different settings: In the first…
In this paper, we study the number of equilibria of the replicator-mutator dynamics for both deterministic and random multi-player two-strategy evolutionary games. For deterministic games, using Decartes' rule of signs, we provide a formula…
The degeneracy of central configurations in the planar $N$-body problem makes their enumeration problem hard and the related dynamics appealing. To truly understand the bifurcations of central configurations, we should work in the FULL…
The paper develops a new technique to extract a characteristic subset from a random source that repeatedly samples from a set of elements. Here a characteristic subset is a set that when containing an element contains all elements that have…
Parrondo's games manifest the apparent paradox where losing strategies can be combined to win and have generated significant multidisciplinary interest in the literature. Here we review two recent approaches, based on the Fokker-Planck…
Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can…
Arrangement theory plays an essential role in the study of the unfolding model used in many fields. This paper describes how arrangement theory can be usefully employed in solving the problems of counting (i) the number of admissible…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
A knockout tournament is one of the most simple and popular forms of competition. Here, we are given a binary tournament tree where all leaves are labeled with seed position names. The players participating in the tournament are assigned to…
A Dirichlet-type problem is studied for an equation of even order with variable coefficients. A criterion for the uniqueness of a solution is given. The solution is built in the form of a Fourier series. When justifying the convergence of…