相关论文: On the Lottery Problem: Tracing Stefan Mandel's Co…
The problem of classifying linear systems of conics in projective planes dates back at least to Jordan, who classified pencils (one-dimensional systems) of conics over $\mathbb{C}$ and $\mathbb{R}$ in 1906--1907. The analogous problem for…
The game of Hangman is a classical asymmetric two player game in which one player, the setter, chooses a secret word from a language, that the other player, the guesser, tries to discover through single letter matching queries, answered by…
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
The lottery ticket hypothesis posits that dense networks contain sparse subnetworks, ``winning tickets,'' that, when rewound to their initial weights and retrained in isolation, match the performance of the full model. We ask a more…
Leonhard Euler likely developed his summation formula in 1732, and soon used it to estimate the sum of the reciprocal squares to 14 digits --- a value mathematicians had been competing to determine since Leibniz's astonishing discovery that…
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…
We study the problem of whether a betting-strategy can be decomposed into an equivalent set of simpler betting-strategies, such as betting-strategies that bet on a restricted set of stages or bet on a restricted of favorable outcomes. We…
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…
The classical theorem of Wendel provides an exact formula for the probability that the convex hull of independent symmetrically distributed vectors in ${\mathbb R}^d$ contains the origin as long as the distributions of the vectors are…
Imprecise probability is concerned with uncertainty about which probability distributions to use. It has applications in robust statistics and machine learning. We look at programming language models for imprecise probability. Our…
We introduce a new combinatorial game, named Triangle Game. In this game, a directed $3$-cycle graph is given, and tokens are placed on each vertex. The player chooses an edge and takes at least one token from the initial vertex. At the…
The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) states that a randomly-initialized large neural network contains a small sub-network (i.e., winning tickets) which, when trained in isolation, can achieve comparable performance to the large network. LTH…
In a game of permutation wordle, a player attempts to guess a secret permutation in the fewest number of guesses possible. Previously, Samuel Kutin and Lawren Smithline (arXiv:2408.00903) introduced this game and proposed a strategy called…
Consider the coupon collector problem where each box of a brand of cereal contains a coupon and there are n different types of coupons. Suppose that the probability of a box containing a coupon of a specific type is $1/n$ and that we keep…
Toral introduced so-called cooperative Parrondo games, in which there are N players (3 or more) arranged in a circle. At each turn one player is randomly chosen to play. He plays either game A or game B. Game A results in a win or loss of…
We introduce and study several random combinatorial billiard trajectories. Such a system, which depends on a fixed parameter $p\in(0,1)$, models a beam of light that travels in a Euclidean space, occasionally randomly reflecting off of a…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
The multi-armed bandit is a concise model for the problem of iterated decision-making under uncertainty. In each round, a gambler must pull one of $K$ arms of a slot machine, without any foreknowledge of their payouts, except that they are…
Toral introduced so-called cooperative Parrondo games, in which there are N players (3 or more) arranged in a circle. At each turn one player is randomly chosen to play. He plays either game A or game B, depending on the strategy. Game A…
Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…