相关论文: Conway's napkin problem
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
This paper intends to survey the vast literature devoted to a problem posed by Wilf in 1978 which, despite the attention it attracted, remains unsolved. As it frequently happens with combinatorial problems, many researchers who got involved…
The Sleeping Beauty problem is a problem of imperfect recall that has received considerable attention. One approach to solving the Sleeping Beauty problem is to allow Sleeping Beauty to make decisions based on her beliefs, and then…
Conway and Doyle have claimed to be able to divide by three. We attempt to replicate their achievement and fail. In the process, we get tangled up in some shoes and socks and forget how to multiply.
In this paper, we investigate two variants of the secretary problem. In these variants, we are presented with a sequence of numbers $X_i$ that come from distributions $\mathcal{D}_i$, and that arrive in either random or adversarial order.…
We address the problem of enumeration of seating arrangements of married couples around a circular table such that no spouses sit next to each other and no k consecutive persons are of the same gender. While the case of k=2 corresponds to…
If you want to fill $n \in \mathbb{N}$ seats in succession with $n$ people and the rule that each person chooses one of the seats with the maximum distance to an occupied seat, then you can ask yourself how many possibilities there are for…
Logical theories have been developed which have allowed temporal reasoning about eventualities (a la Galton) such as states, processes, actions, events, processes and complex eventualities such as sequences and recurrences of other…
The secretary problem or the game of Googol are classic models for online selection problems that have received significant attention in the last five decades. We consider a variant of the problem and explore its connections to data-driven…
We revisit a version of the classic occupancy scheme, where balls are thrown until almost all boxes receive a given number of balls. Special cases are widely known as coupon-collectors and dixie cup problems. We show that as the number of…
Lionel Levine's hat challenge has $t$ players, each with a (very large, or infinite) stack of hats on their head, each hat independently colored at random black or white. The players are allowed to coordinate before the random colors are…
The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…
In the well-studied Stable Roommates problem, we seek a stable matching of agents into pairs, where no two agents prefer each other over their assigned partners. However, some instances of this problem are unsolvable, lacking any stable…
Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is…
Lionel Levine's hat challenge has $t$ players, each with a (very large, or infinite) stack of hats on their head, each hat independently colored at random black or white. The players are allowed to coordinate before the random colors are…
Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform…
We are given suppliers and customers, and a set of tables. Every evening of the forthcoming days, there will be a dinner. Each customer must eat with each supplier exactly once, but two suppliers may meet at most once at a table. The number…
A drawing of a graph in the plane is called a thrackle if every pair of edges meets precisely once, either at a common vertex or at a proper crossing. Let t(n) denote the maximum number of edges that a thrackle of n vertices can have.…
The Illumination Problem may be phrased as the problem of covering a convex body in Euclidean $n$-space by a minimum number of translates of its interior. By a probabilistic argument, we show that, arbitrarily close to the Euclidean ball,…
The Possible Winner (PW) problem, a fundamental algorithmic problem in computational social choice, concerns elections where voters express only partial preferences between candidates. Via a sequence of investigations, a complete…