1,161 research outputs found
On "Indifference" and Backward Induction in Games with Perfect Information
Indifference of a player with respect to two distinct outcomes of a game
cannot be handled by small perturbations, because the actual choice may have
significant impact on other players, and cause them to act in a way that has
significant impact of the indifferent player. It is argued that ties among
rational choices can be resolved by refinements of the concept of rationality
based on the utilities of other players. One such refinement is the concept of
Tit-for-Tat
Remarks on Utility in Repeated Bets
The use of von Neumann -- Morgenstern utility is examined in the context of
multiple choices between lotteries. Different conclusions are reached if the
choices are simultaneous or sequential. It is demonstrated that utility cannot
be additive
The parameterized complexity of some geometric problems in unbounded dimension
We study the parameterized complexity of the following fundamental geometric
problems with respect to the dimension : i) Given points in \Rd,
compute their minimum enclosing cylinder. ii) Given two -point sets in
\Rd, decide whether they can be separated by two hyperplanes. iii) Given a
system of linear inequalities with variables, find a maximum-size
feasible subsystem. We show that (the decision versions of) all these problems
are W[1]-hard when parameterized by the dimension . %and hence not solvable
in time, for any computable function and constant
%(unless FPT=W[1]). Our reductions also give a -time lower bound
(under the Exponential Time Hypothesis)
Data-Collection for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: a Network-Flow Heuristic
The goal of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is ``to map in detail one-quarter of
the entire sky, determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more
than 100 million celestial objects''. The survey will be performed by taking
``snapshots'' through a large telescope. Each snapshot can capture up to 600
objects from a small circle of the sky. This paper describes the design and
implementation of the algorithm that is being used to determine the snapshots
so as to minimize their number. The problem is NP-hard in general; the
algorithm described is a heuristic, based on Lagriangian-relaxation and
min-cost network flow. It gets within 5-15% of a naive lower bound, whereas
using a ``uniform'' cover only gets within 25-35%.Comment: proceedings version appeared in ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete
Algorithms (1998
Hybrid Rounding Techniques for Knapsack Problems
We address the classical knapsack problem and a variant in which an upper
bound is imposed on the number of items that can be selected. We show that
appropriate combinations of rounding techniques yield novel and powerful ways
of rounding. As an application of these techniques, we present a linear-storage
Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) and a Fully Polynomial Time
Approximation Scheme (FPTAS) that compute an approximate solution, of any fixed
accuracy, in linear time. This linear complexity bound gives a substantial
improvement of the best previously known polynomial bounds.Comment: 19 LaTeX page
Computing the Least-core and Nucleolus for Threshold Cardinality Matching Games
Cooperative games provide a framework for fair and stable profit allocation
in multi-agent systems. \emph{Core}, \emph{least-core} and \emph{nucleolus} are
such solution concepts that characterize stability of cooperation. In this
paper, we study the algorithmic issues on the least-core and nucleolus of
threshold cardinality matching games (TCMG). A TCMG is defined on a graph
and a threshold , in which the player set is and the profit of
a coalition is 1 if the size of a maximum matching in
meets or exceeds , and 0 otherwise. We first show that for a TCMG, the
problems of computing least-core value, finding and verifying least-core payoff
are all polynomial time solvable. We also provide a general characterization of
the least core for a large class of TCMG. Next, based on Gallai-Edmonds
Decomposition in matching theory, we give a concise formulation of the
nucleolus for a typical case of TCMG which the threshold equals . When
the threshold is relevant to the input size, we prove that the nucleolus
can be obtained in polynomial time in bipartite graphs and graphs with a
perfect matching
An Efficient Interior-Point Method for Online Convex Optimization
A new algorithm for regret minimization in online convex optimization is
described. The regret of the algorithm after time periods is - which is the minimum possible up to a logarithmic term. In
addition, the new algorithm is adaptive, in the sense that the regret bounds
hold not only for the time periods but also for every sub-interval
. The running time of the algorithm matches that of newly
introduced interior point algorithms for regret minimization: in
-dimensional space, during each iteration the new algorithm essentially
solves a system of linear equations of order , rather than solving some
constrained convex optimization problem in dimensions and possibly many
constraints
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