The yellow cake

The MEGA-cake problem

This question was posed as a challenge problem during the MEGA-conference. The prize, a large cake, was to be divided among the submitters towards a solution of the problem. This explains the name of this article. It turned out that it is not very easy to say something nontrivial about this problem, so the number of submissions to the problem was very small indeed, one. The prize winner subsequ...

Cake Cutting Really is Not a Piece of Cake and Balanced Allocations of Cake

From 24.06. to 29.06.2007, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07261 Fair Division was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put to...

Cake Cutting ∗

In the 2nd world war, if you’re a collection of Polish mathematicians sitting out the war in Lvov, your thoughts naturally turn to ... cake. Or more precisely, how to cut a cake. This is the beginning of what we now call the problem of “fair division”. Fair division algorithms are examples of what we might now call a mechanism, much like an auction. These are protocols designed to allocate reso...

Omental cake

A 48-year-old woman without systemic disease presented to the emergency department with a 2-month history of abdominal pain and distension. General malaise, anorexia, alternating constipation and diarrhea, and intractable hiccups were also noted. Physical examinations revealed a soft and distended abdomen without an obvious tender point. Routine laboratory tests were unremarkable except for mil...

Cake-Cutting is Not a Pie e of Cake