No Arabic abstract
The general adwords problem has remained largely unresolved. We define a subcase called {em $k$-TYPICAL}, $k in Zplus$, as follows: the total budget of all the bidders is sufficient to buy $k$ bids for each bidder. This seems a reasonable assumption for a typical instance, at least for moderate values of $k$. We give a randomized online algorithm, achieving a competitive ratio of $left(1 - {1 over e} - {1 over k} right)$, for this problem. We also give randomized online algorithms for other special cases of adwords. Another subcase, when bids are small compared to budgets, has been of considerable practical significance in ad auctions cite{MSVV}. For this case, we give an optimal randomized online algorithm achieving a competitive ratio of $left(1 - {1 over e} right)$. Previous algorithms for this case were based on LP-duality; the impact of our new approach remains to be seen. The key to these results is a simplification of the proof for RANKING, the optimal algorithm for online bipartite matching, given in cite{KVV}. Our algorithms for adwords can be seen as natural extensions of RANKING.
Given $n$ colored balls, we want to detect if more than $lfloor n/2rfloor$ of them have the same color, and if so find one ball with such majority color. We are only allowed to choose two balls and compare their colors, and the goal is to minimize the total number of such operations. A well-known exercise is to show how to find such a ball with only $2n$ comparisons while using only a logarithmic number of bits for bookkeeping. The resulting algorithm is called the Boyer--Moore majority vote algorithm. It is known that any deterministic method needs $lceil 3n/2rceil-2$ comparisons in the worst case, and this is tight. However, it is not clear what is the required number of comparisons if we allow randomization. We construct a randomized algorithm which always correctly finds a ball of the majority color (or detects that there is none) using, with high probability, only $7n/6+o(n)$ comparisons. We also prove that the expected number of comparisons used by any such randomized method is at least $1.019n$.
In this paper we show that many sequential randomized incremental algorithms are in fact parallel. We consider algorithms for several problems including Delaunay triangulation, linear programming, closest pair, smallest enclosing disk, least-element lists, and strongly connected components. We analyze the dependences between iterations in an algorithm, and show that the dependence structure is shallow with high probability, or that by violating some dependences the structure is shallow and the work is not increased significantly. We identify three types of algorithms based on their dependences and present a framework for analyzing each type. Using the framework gives work-efficient polylogarithmic-depth parallel algorithms for most of the problems that we study. This paper shows the first incremental Delaunay triangulation algorithm with optimal work and polylogarithmic depth, which is an open problem for over 30 years. This result is important since most implementations of parallel Delaunay triangulation use the incremental approach. Our results also improve bounds on strongly connected components and least-elements lists, and significantly simplify parallel algorithms for several problems.
A string $S[1,n]$ is a power (or tandem repeat) of order $k$ and period $n/k$ if it can decomposed into $k$ consecutive equal-length blocks of letters. Powers and periods are fundamental to string processing, and algorithms for their efficient computation have wide application and are heavily studied. Recently, Fici et al. (Proc. ICALP 2016) defined an {em anti-power} of order $k$ to be a string composed of $k$ pairwise-distinct blocks of the same length ($n/k$, called {em anti-period}). Anti-powers are a natural converse to powers, and are objects of combinatorial interest in their own right. In this paper we initiate the algorithmic study of anti-powers. Given a string $S$, we describe an optimal algorithm for locating all substrings of $S$ that are anti-powers of a specified order. The optimality of the algorithm follows form a combinatorial lemma that provides a lower bound on the number of distinct anti-powers of a given order: we prove that a string of length $n$ can contain $Theta(n^2/k)$ distinct anti-powers of order $k$.
In this paper, we show a connection between a certain online low-congestion routing problem and an online prediction of graph labeling. More specifically, we prove that if there exists a routing scheme that guarantees a congestion of $alpha$ on any edge, there exists an online prediction algorithm with mistake bound $alpha$ times the cut size, which is the size of the cut induced by the label partitioning of graph vertices. With previous known bound of $O(log n)$ for $alpha$ for the routing problem on trees with $n$ vertices, we obtain an improved prediction algorithm for graphs with high effective resistance. In contrast to previous approaches that move the graph problem into problems in vector space using graph Laplacian and rely on the analysis of the perceptron algorithm, our proof are purely combinatorial. Further more, our approach directly generalizes to the case where labels are not binary.
Online algorithms make decisions based on past inputs. In general, the decision may depend on the entire history of inputs. If many computers run the same online algorithm with the same input stream but are started at different times, they do not necessarily make consistent decisions. In this work we introduce time-local online algorithms. These are online algorithms where the output at a given time only depends on $T = O(1)$ latest inputs. The use of (deterministic) time-local algorithms in a distributed setting automatically leads to globally consistent decisions. Our key observation is that time-local online algorithms (in which the output at a given time only depends on local inputs in the temporal dimension) are closely connected to local distributed graph algorithms (in which the output of a given node only depends on local inputs in the spatial dimension). This makes it possible to interpret prior work on distributed graph algorithms from the perspective of online algorithms. We describe an algorithm synthesis method that one can use to design optimal time-local online algorithms for small values of $T$. We demonstrate the power of the technique in the context of a variant of the online file migration problem, and show that e.g. for two nodes and unit migration costs there exists a $3$-competitive time-local algorithm with horizon $T=4$, while no deterministic online algorithm (in the classic sense) can do better. We also derive upper and lower bounds for a more general version of the problem; we show that there is a $6$-competitive deterministic time-local algorithm and a $2.62$-competitive randomized time-local algorithm for any migration cost $alpha ge 1$.