These notes describe what might be a Markov chain method for choosing a random Steiner triple system. Many things are not known, including whether or not the Markov chain is connected! I include a positive result of Grannell and Griggs according to which any two isomorphic Steiner triple systems lie in the same connected component. 1 Choosing at random Suppose I have a fair coin. How can I choo...

1. INTRODUCTION: MAKING MONEY. With a title like this, one might expect to find described here some unsolved problem assigned a decidedly paltry bounty by a strapped mathematical institute, or perhaps a pet question from an eccentric, but thrifty, individual. Indeed, this is an article about how to make money, but it is not at all about some scheme to earn income. Rather, it concerns how actual...

The problem of generating random bits from an arbitrary biased coin, dating back to von Neumann’s 1951 work, has been extensively studied. Specifically, given a fixed number of biased coin tosses with unknown probability, it is well known how to generate random bits with an asymptotically optimal efficiency. In this paper we address two basic questions related to the generation of random bits. ...

An α-fair coin-tossing protocol allows a set of mutually distrustful parties to generate a uniform bit, such that no efficient adversary can bias the output bit by more than α. Cleve [STOC 1986] has shown that if half of the parties can be corrupted, then, no r-round coin-tossing protocol is o(1/r)-fair. For over two decades the best known m-party protocols, tolerating up to t ≥ m/2 corrupted p...

A Collective Intelligence (COIN) can improve the exploitation of a limited renewable resource compared to fully cooperative or fully competitive approaches. The main strength of a COIN lies in approximating the impact of an agent on the short-term behaviour of a Complex Adaptive System. By penalising behaviours which lead to no measurable impact, COIN simplifies the implementation of an appropr...

This paper introduces autonomous sorting of moving coins via a robot as a multi-level task that supports the principled study of robotics fundamentals including kinematics, dynamics, perception, motion planning, controls, and optimization based around a widely obtainable, standardized, low-cost object (a coin). The paper also presents a demonstrated solution to this in the form of the CHARM (Co...

In recent years, there was a rapid increase in the number of medical articles. The number of articles in PubMed has increased exponentially. Thus, the workload for biocurators has also increased exponentially. Under these circumstances, a system that can automatically determine in advance which article has a higher priority for curation can effectively reduce the workload of biocurators. Determ...

A family of functions is weakly pseudorandom if a random member of the family is indistinguishable from a uniform random function when queried on random inputs. We point out a subtle ambiguity in the definition of weak PRFs: there are natural weak PRFs whose security breaks down if the randomness used to sample the inputs is revealed. To capture this ambiguity we distinguish between public-coin...

It is well known that it is impossible for two parties to toss a coin fairly (Cleve, STOC 1986). This result implies that it is impossible to securely compute with fairness any function that can be used to toss a fair coin. In this paper, we focus on the class of deterministic Boolean functions with finite domain, and we ask for which functions in this class is it possible to information-theore...

In this paper, we propose a method to design a neural network(NN) by using a genetic algorithm(GA) and simulated annealing(SA). And also, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we apply the proposed scheme to a coin recognition example. In general, as a problem becomes complex and large-scale, the number of operations increases and hardware implementation to real syst...