Publications by xi'an
Le Monde puzzle [#1076]
A cheezy Le Monde mathematical puzzle : (which took me much longer to find [in the sense of locating] than to solve, as Warwick U does not get a daily delivery of the newspaper [and this is pre-Brexit!]): Take a round pizza (or a wheel of Gruyère) cut into seven identical slices and turn one slice upside down. If the only possibly moves are to ...
1554 sym R (788 sym/3 pcs) 2 img
Le Monde puzzle [#1081]
A “he said-she said” Le Monde mathematical puzzle (again in the spirit of the famous Singapore high-school birthdate problem): Abigail and Corentin are both given a positive integer, a and b, such that a+b is either 19 or 20. They are asked one after the other and repeatedly if they are sure of the other’s number. What is the maximum numbe...
960 sym R (511 sym/1 pcs) 2 img
more concentration, everywhere
Although it may sound like an excessive notion of optimality, one can hope at obtaining an estimator δ of a unidimensional parameter θ that is always closer to θ that any other parameter. In distribution if not almost surely, meaning the cdf of (δ-θ) is steeper than for other estimators enjoying the same cdf at zero (for instance ½ to make ...
1616 sym 4 img
missing digit in a 114 digit number [a Riddler’s riddle]
A puzzling riddle from The Riddler (as Le Monde had a painful geometry riddle this week): this number with 114 digits 530,131,801,762,787,739,802,889,792,754,109,70?,139,358,547,710,066,257,652,050,346,294,484,433,323,974,747,960,297,803,292,989,236,183,040,000,000,000 is missing one digit and is a product of some of the integers between 2 and 99...
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Le Monde puzzle [#1083]
A Le Monde mathematical puzzle that seems hard to solve without the backup of a computer (and just simple enough to code on a flight to Montpellier): Given the number N=2,019, find a decomposition of N as a sum of non-trivial powers of integers such that (a) the number of integers in the sum is maximal or (b) all powers are equal to 4. Is it p...
1335 sym R (169 sym/2 pcs) 2 img
Le Monde puzzle [#1085]
A new Le Monde mathematical puzzle in the digit category: Given 13 arbitrary relative integers chosen by Bo, Abigail can select any subset of them to be drifted by plus or minus one by Bo, repeatedly until Abigail reaches the largest possible number N of multiples of 5. What is the minimal possible value of N under the assumption that Bo tries t...
1451 sym 2 img
simulation fodder for future exams
Here are two nice exercises for a future simulation exam, seen and solved on X validated.The first one is about simulating a Gibbs sampler associated with the joint target exp{-|x|-|y|-a(y-x|} defined over IR² for a≥0 (or possibly a>-1). The conditionals are identical and non-standard, but a simple bound on the conditional density is the corre...
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call for sessions and labs at Bay2sC0mp²⁰
A call to all potential participants to the incoming BayesComp 2020 conference at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, 7-10 January 2020, to submit proposals [to me] for contributed sessions on everything computational or training labs [to David Rossell] on a specific language or software. The deadline is April 1 and the sessions wi...
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Le Monde puzzle [#1087]
A board-like Le Monde mathematical puzzle in the digit category: Given a (k,m) binary matrix, what is the maximum number S of entries with only one neighbour equal to one? Solve for k=m=2,…,13, and k=6,m=8. For instance, for k=m=2, the matrix is producing the maximal number 4. I first attempted a brute force random filling of these matrices ...
1365 sym R (1031 sym/2 pcs) 4 img
(x=scan())%in%(2*4^(n=0:x)-2^n-1)
One challenge on code golf is to find the shortest possible code to identify whether or not an integer belongs to the binary cyclops numbers which binary expansion is 0, 101, 11011, 1110111, 111101111, &tc. The n-th such number being this leads to the above solution in R (26 bits). The same length as the C solution [which I do not get] f(n){n=~n...
1057 sym 6 img