相关论文: Emptying Sets: The Cookie Monster Problem

In this paper we consider two metric covering/clustering problems - \textit{Minimum Cost Covering Problem} (MCC) and $k$-clustering. In the MCC problem, we are given two point sets $X$ (clients) and $Y$ (servers), and a metric on $X \cup…

We generalize the well-known Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) in combinatorics. Our problem is to find the minimum and expected number of draws, with replacement, required to recover $n$ distinctly labeled coupons, with each draw consisting…

The cocktail party problem refers to the famous selective attention problem of how to find out the signal of each individual sources from signals of a number of detectors. In the classical cocktail party problem, the signal of each source…

We consider the $k$-center problem on the space of fixed-size point sets in the plane under the $L_{\infty}$-bottleneck distance. While this problem is motivated by persistence diagrams in topological data analysis, we illustrate it as a…

A covering system of the integers is a finite collection of modular residue classes $\{a_m \bmod{m}\}_{m \in S}$ whose union is all integers. Given a finite set $S$ of moduli, it is often difficult to tell whether there is a choice of…

The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and…

The number partitioning problem consists of partitioning a sequence of positive numbers ${a_1,a_2,..., a_N}$ into two disjoint sets, ${\cal A}$ and ${\cal B}$, such that the absolute value of the difference of the sums of $a_j$ over the two…

Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…

The problem of ranking can be described as follows. We have a set of combinatorial objects $S$, such as, say, the k-subsets of n things, and we can imagine that they have been arranged in some list, say lexicographically, and we want to…

Let $a=(a_1,\ldots,a_n)$ and $b=(b_1,\ldots,b_n)$ be two $n$-tuples of positive integers, let $X$ be a set of positive integers, and let $g$ be a positive integer. In this work we show an algorithmic process in order to compute all the sets…

A covering code is a set of codewords with the property that the union of balls, suitably defined, around these codewords covers an entire space. Generally, the goal is to find the covering code with the minimum size codebook. While most…

In the preceding decade, Andrews and Newman resurrected the concept of a `minimal excludant' of a partition ($mex$, for short), namely, the least positive missing integer in a partition. Subsequently, several authors have not only studied…

Given two sets finite $S_0$ and $S_1$ of quantum states. We show necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing them by a measurement.

Given $n$ piles of tokens and a positive integer $k \leq n$, we study the following two impartial combinatorial games Nim$^1_{n, \leq k}$ and Nim$^1_{n, =k}$. In the first (resp. second) game, a player, by one move, chooses at least $1$ and…

A query game is a pair of a set $Q$ of queries and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of functions, or codewords $f:Q\rightarrow \mathbb{Z}.$ We think of this as a two-player game. One player, Codemaker, picks a hidden codeword $f\in \mathcal{F}$. The…

Consider the commonly known puzzle, given $k$ glass balls, find an optimal algorithm to determine the lowest floor of a building of $n$ floors from which a thrown glass ball will break. This puzzle was originally posed in its original form…

We explore a reconfiguration version of the dominating set problem, where a dominating set in a graph $G$ is a set $S$ of vertices such that each vertex is either in $S$ or has a neighbour in $S$. In a reconfiguration problem, the goal is…

The strategic Go game, known for the tedious mathematical complexities, has been used as a theme in many fiction, movies, and books. Here, we introduce the Go game and provide a new version of quantum Go in which the boxes are initially in…

Ball sort puzzle is a popular logic puzzle consisting of several bins containing balls of multiple colors. Each bin works like a stack; a ball has to follow the last-in first-out order. The player has to sort the balls by color such that…

In Combinatorial Game Theory, short game forms are defined recursively over all the positions the two players are allowed to move to. A form is decomposable if it can be expressed as a disjunctive sum of two forms with smaller birthday. If…