2,807 research outputs found
Laser-generated plasma as a spectroscopic light source
Laser generated plasma as spectroscopic light sourc
A new heap game
Given heaps of tokens. The moves of the 2-player game introduced
here are to either take a positive number of tokens from at most heaps,
or to remove the {\sl same} positive number of tokens from all the heaps.
We analyse this extension of Wythoff's game and provide a polynomial-time
strategy for it.Comment: To appear in Computer Games 199
Words with the Maximum Number of Abelian Squares
An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one
another. A word of length can contain distinct factors that
are abelian squares. We study infinite words such that the number of abelian
square factors of length grows quadratically with .Comment: To appear in the proceedings of WORDS 201
Traveling salesmen in the presence of competition
AbstractWe propose the “competing salesmen problem” (CSP), a two-player competitive version of the classical traveling salesman problem. This problem arises when considering two competing salesmen instead of just one. The concern for a shortest tour is replaced by the necessity to reach any of the customers before the opponent does.In particular, we consider the situation where players take turns, moving along one edge at a time within a graph G=(V,E). The set of customers is given by a subset VC⊆V of the vertices. At any given time, both players know of their opponent's position. A player wins if he is able to reach a majority of the vertices in VC before the opponent does.We prove that the CSP is PSPACE-complete, even if the graph is bipartite, and both players start at distance 2 from each other. Furthermore, we show that the starting player may not be able to avoid losing the game, even if both players start from the same vertex. However, for the case of bipartite graphs, we show that the starting player always can avoid a loss. On the other hand, we show that the second player can avoid to lose by more than one customer, when play takes place on a graph that is a tree T, and VC consists of leaves of T. It is unclear whether a polynomial strategy exists for any of the two players to force this outcome. For the case where T is a star (i.e., a tree with only one vertex of degree higher than two) and VC consists of n leaves of T, we give a simple and fast strategy which is optimal for both players. If VC consists not only of leaves, we point out that the situation is more involved
Game saturation of intersecting families
We consider the following combinatorial game: two players, Fast and Slow,
claim -element subsets of alternately, one at each turn,
such that both players are allowed to pick sets that intersect all previously
claimed subsets. The game ends when there does not exist any unclaimed
-subset that meets all already claimed sets. The score of the game is the
number of sets claimed by the two players, the aim of Fast is to keep the score
as low as possible, while the aim of Slow is to postpone the game's end as long
as possible. The game saturation number is the score of the game when both
players play according to an optimal strategy. To be precise we have to
distinguish two cases depending on which player takes the first move. Let
and denote the score of
the saturation game when both players play according to an optimal strategy and
the game starts with Fast's or Slow's move, respectively. We prove that
holds
Palindromic complexity of trees
We consider finite trees with edges labeled by letters on a finite alphabet
. Each pair of nodes defines a unique labeled path whose trace is a
word of the free monoid . The set of all such words defines the
language of the tree. In this paper, we investigate the palindromic complexity
of trees and provide hints for an upper bound on the number of distinct
palindromes in the language of a tree.Comment: Submitted to the conference DLT201
Construction and Expected Performance of the Hadron Blind Detector for the PHENIX Experiment at RHIC
A new Hadron Blind Detector (HBD) for electron identification in high density
hadron environment has been installed in the PHENIX detector at RHIC in the
fall of 2006. The HBD will identify low momentum electron-positron pairs to
reduce the combinatorial background in the mass spectrum, mainly
in the low-mass region below 1 GeV/c. The HBD is a windowless
proximity-focusing Cherenkov detector with a radiator length of 50 cm, a CsI
photocathode and three layers of Gas Electron Multipliers (GEM). The HBD uses
pure CF as a radiator and a detector gas. Construction details and the
expected performance of the detector are described.Comment: QM2006 proceedings, 4 pages 3 figure
A Hadron Blind Detector for the PHENIX Experiment
A novel Hadron Blind Detector (HBD) has been developed for an upgrade of the
PHENIX experiment at RHIC. The HBD will allow a precise measurement of
electron-positron pairs from the decay of the light vector mesons and the
low-mass pair continuum in heavy-ion collisions. The detector consists of a 50
cm long radiator filled with pure CF4 and directly coupled in a windowless
configuration to a triple Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detector with a CsI
photocathode evaporated on the top face of the first GEM foil.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Quark Matter 2005 conference proceeding
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