# All Questions

6,189 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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### Is there a regular tree language in which the average height of a tree of size $n$ is neither $\Theta(n)$ nor $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$?

We define a regular tree language as in the book TATA: It is the set of trees accepted by a non-deterministic finite tree automaton (Chapter 1) or, equivalently, the set of trees generated by a ...
439 views

### Finding an $st$-path in a planar graph which is adjacent to the fewest number of faces

I am curious whether the following problems has been studied before, but wasn't able to find any papers about it: Given a planar graph $G$, and two vertices $s$ and $t$, find an $s$-$t$ path $P$ ...
2k views

### Is it NP-hard to fill up bins with minimum moves?

There are $n$ bins and $m$ type of balls. The $i$th bin has labels $a_{i,j}$ for $1\leq j\leq m$, it is the expected number of balls of type $j$. You start with $b_j$ balls of type $j$. Each ball of ...
748 views

### Graph problem known to be $NP$-complete only under Cook reduction

The theory of NP-completeness was initially built on Cook (polynomial-time Turing) reductions. Later, Karp introduced polynomial-time many-to-one reductions. A Cook reduction is more powerful than a ...
2k views

### Longest Repeated (Scattered) Subsequence in a String

Informal Problem Statement: Given a string, e.g. $ACCABBAB$, we want to colour some letters red and some letters blue (and some not at all), such that reading only the red letters from left to right ...
580 views

### Can a calculus have incremental copying and closed scopes?

A few days ago, I proposed the Abstract Calculus, a minimal untyped language that is very similar to the Lambda Calculus, except for the main difference that substitutions are ...
494 views

### Largest set of cocircular points

Given $n$ points with integer coordinates in the plane, determine the maximum number of points that lie on the same circle (on its circumference, not its interior). This can be done in $O(n^3)$ ...
454 views

### Approximate minimum-weighted tree decomposition on complete graphs

Say I have a weighted undirected complete graph $G = (V, E)$. Each edge $e = (u, v, w)$ is assigned with a positive weight $w$. I want to calculate the minimum-weighted $(d, h)$-tree-decomposition. By ...
796 views

### Compression of domain names

I am curious as to how one might very compactly compress the domain of an arbitrary IDN hostname (as defined by RFC5890) and suspect this could become an interesting challenge. A Unicode host or ...
301 views

### Machines for context-free languages which gain no extra power from nondeterminism

When considering machine models of computation, the Chomsky hierarchy is normally characterised by (in order), finite automata, push-down automata, linear bound automata and Turing Machines. For the ...
736 views

### Why hasn't functional programming researched dynamic trees?

Dynamic trees play an important role in solving problems such as network flows, dynamic graphs, combinatorial problems ("Dynamic Trees in Practice" by Tarjan and Werneck) and recently merging ...
928 views

### Could min cut be easier than network flow?

Thanks to the max-flow min-cut theorem, we know that we can use any algorithm to compute a maximum flow in a network graph to compute a $(s,t)$-min-cut. Therefore, the complexity of computing a ...
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### Is finding a weight-balanced tree NP-hard?

In the following, we consider binary trees where only the leaves have weights. Let $T$ be a binary tree and $W(T)$ be the sum of the weights of its leaves. Let $T.l$ and $T.r$ be the left child and ...
192 views

### Using logic to prove non-regularity of a language

A language $L$ is regular if and only if it is definiable by a sentence in monadic second order logic (MSO) over strings (J.R. Buchi, Weak second-order arithmetic and Finite automata; Z. Math. Logik ...
181 views

### Why do we have to forbid non-conforming lower and upper type bounds?

(it's a repost of my unanswered question from scala-user@googlegroups.com about Scala) In the Scala Language Specification, §4.4 Type Parameters, there is a requirement: The most general form of a ...
344 views

### Steps that guarantee exiting a maze

Given a 2-dimensional maze where you can give 4 commands "move up/down/right/left". Knowing the maze but not where the person is, how to find the minimum sequence of commands that guarantees exiting ...
221 views

### Flow graph that requires pushing back flow in Ford Fulkerson

Does there exist a flow graph that always requires flow to be pushed back no matter what ordering of augmenting paths is chosen in Ford Fulkerson? Let's assume we use the standard procedure of ...
453 views

### The difference between dynamic logic and temporal logic

To find the difference, I'd just encountered with assertions below about temporal logic in Wikipedia: another variant of modal logic sharing many common features with dynamic logic, differs from ...
368 views

### Choosing a subset of binary variables to maximize the sum of the highest $K$

Consider the following problem: Input: integers $n > m > k$; $n$ numbers $0 \leq p_1, \ldots, p_n \leq 1$; $n$ numbers $r_1, \ldots, r_n$ where ($r_i \geq 0$). Let $X_1,\dots,X_n$ be $n$ ...
512 views

### Test whether two languages are equal, when give in algebraic form

This sub-problem is motivated by Algorithm to test whether a language is regular. Suppose we have two languages $L_1,L_2$ that are expressed in "algebraic" form, as formalized below. I want to ...
496 views

### Optimal meeting point in directed graph

Let $G(V, E)$ be a edge-weighted directed connected graph and $v_1, \dots, v_n \in V$ be some vertices. Let $d(a, b)$ denote the length of the shortest path from $a$ to $b$, for $a,b \in V$. I need ...
902 views

### Alternative to Bloom filter for extreme parameters

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure to perform membership-tests on a set (see Wikipedia's page for a definition; I use the same notations below). I am interested in a ...
295 views

### How fast can we compute the size of maximum matching in an unweighted bipartite graph?

Is there a way to compute the size of a maximum matching in an unweighted bipartite graph more efficiently (e.g. faster) than computing a maximum matching? It is a long shot but it is often an ...
246 views

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### Does Automatic Differentiation handle conditional branches, if yes how?

I'm trying to understand how Automatic Differentiation (AD) works. For simple algebraic operation, I get the chain rule thing. But, when the code contains conditional statement like ...
82 views

### Interval density of time bounded Kolmogorov complexity

The Kolmogorov complexity of a string $x$ is the size of the smallest Turing machine $M$ that started on empty tape produces $x$. To make it computable, we can add a bound on the time used by $M$ to ...
Given a string $s$, I would like to find the longest repeating (at least twice) subsequence. That is, I would like to find a string $w$ which is a subsequence (doesn't have to be a contiguous) of $s$ ...