418 research outputs found
Two-batch liar games on a general bounded channel
We consider an extension of the 2-person R\'enyi-Ulam liar game in which lies
are governed by a channel , a set of allowable lie strings of maximum length
. Carole selects , and Paul makes -ary queries to uniquely
determine . In each of rounds, Paul weakly partitions and asks for such that . Carole responds with some
, and if , then accumulates a lie . Carole's string of
lies for must be in the channel . Paul wins if he determines within
rounds. We further restrict Paul to ask his questions in two off-line
batches. We show that for a range of sizes of the second batch, the maximum
size of the search space for which Paul can guarantee finding the
distinguished element is as ,
where is the number of lie strings in of maximum length . This
generalizes previous work of Dumitriu and Spencer, and of Ahlswede, Cicalese,
and Deppe. We extend Paul's strategy to solve also the pathological liar
variant, in a unified manner which gives the existence of asymptotically
perfect two-batch adaptive codes for the channel .Comment: 26 page
Deterministic and Probabilistic Binary Search in Graphs
We consider the following natural generalization of Binary Search: in a given
undirected, positively weighted graph, one vertex is a target. The algorithm's
task is to identify the target by adaptively querying vertices. In response to
querying a node , the algorithm learns either that is the target, or is
given an edge out of that lies on a shortest path from to the target.
We study this problem in a general noisy model in which each query
independently receives a correct answer with probability (a
known constant), and an (adversarial) incorrect one with probability .
Our main positive result is that when (i.e., all answers are
correct), queries are always sufficient. For general , we give an
(almost information-theoretically optimal) algorithm that uses, in expectation,
no more than queries, and identifies the target correctly with probability at
leas . Here, denotes the
entropy. The first bound is achieved by the algorithm that iteratively queries
a 1-median of the nodes not ruled out yet; the second bound by careful repeated
invocations of a multiplicative weights algorithm.
Even for , we show several hardness results for the problem of
determining whether a target can be found using queries. Our upper bound of
implies a quasipolynomial-time algorithm for undirected connected
graphs; we show that this is best-possible under the Strong Exponential Time
Hypothesis (SETH). Furthermore, for directed graphs, or for undirected graphs
with non-uniform node querying costs, the problem is PSPACE-complete. For a
semi-adaptive version, in which one may query nodes each in rounds, we
show membership in in the polynomial hierarchy, and hardness
for
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