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Practice Sheet 3

The document is a practice sheet for CS648: Randomized Algorithms at IIT Kanpur, focusing on various problems related to randomized experiments. It includes questions on the Coupon Collector Problem, biased random walks, random walks on complete graphs, and a variant of the client-server problem. Each problem requires calculating expected values related to the respective scenarios presented.

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9 views1 page

Practice Sheet 3

The document is a practice sheet for CS648: Randomized Algorithms at IIT Kanpur, focusing on various problems related to randomized experiments. It includes questions on the Coupon Collector Problem, biased random walks, random walks on complete graphs, and a variant of the client-server problem. Each problem requires calculating expected values related to the respective scenarios presented.

Uploaded by

luaaannd
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CS648 : Randomized Algorithms

CSE, IIT Kanpur


Practice sheet 3: Duration of a randomized experiment

1. Coupon Collector Problem


Recall the coupon collector problem with n different coupons. What is the expected number of
coupons to be collected to have 0.99n different coupons ?

2. A biased random walk


Recall the random walk on a line discussed in the class. Suppose, probability of taking a step in
the right direction is 3/4 and the probability of taking a step in the left direction is 1/4. What is
the expected number of steps till the particle reaches nth milestone ?

3. Random walk on a complete graph


We can extend the notion of random walk on a line to a graph in a very natural manner. Suppose
we are at a vertex v. If u1 , ..., ut are the neighbors of v. The particle selects a vertex randomly
uniformly from {u1 , . . . , ut } and moves to that vertex in the next step.
We are given a complete graph G on n vertices (there is an edge between each pair of vertices).
Consider a random walk in G starting from a vertex u.

(a) Let v be a vertex other than u. What is the expected number of steps of the random walk to
visit v ?

(b) What is the expected number of steps to visit each vertex of the graph at least once ?

(c) What is the expected number of steps to visit half of the vertices ?

4. A variant of client server problem


Consider a parallel computer consisting of n processors and n memory modules. In the first step,
each processor sends a memory request to a memory module selected randomly uniformly. If more
than one processor sends request to the same memory module, the memory module discards all of
them. If a memory module receives only one request, that request gets satisfied. After the first
step, all those processors whose memory request was satisfied, leave the system. The remaining
processors follow the same protocol in the following round. What is the expected number of rounds
when all the memory request have been satisfied ?

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