Power Laws and Power-of-Two-Choices
Host
Department of Applied Mathematics
Speaker
Amanda Redlich
Department of Mathematics, Bowdoin College
https://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/aredlich/
Description
Suppose you need to get a cup of coffee before your ten am discrete seminar talk. You see three different cafes on the way to campus. How do you pick which one to go to? This talk will give a simple randomized algorithm that models a natural decision-making process in such contexts, discuss its potential applications, and analyze it mathematically. The algorithm, related to well-known ``power of two choices" allocation algorithm (first introduced by Azar, Broder, Karlin, and Upfal in 1994), is simple to describe and creates a distribution with some interesting mathematical properties.
Event Topic
Discrete Applied Math Seminar