Student Puzzle Corner
Deadline September 15, 2020. Student members of IMS are invited to submit solutions to bulletin@imstat.org (with subject “Student Puzzle Corner”). The names of student members who submit correct solutions, and the answer, will be published in the issue following the deadline. The Puzzle Editor is Anirban DasGupta. His decision is

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Deadline July 1, 2020. Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes: After our last puzzle with probabilities on hyperspheres [see solution below], it is now time to turn our thoughts again to something in statistics. This time it’s a problem on epidemiology. Anirban DasGupta deliberately leaves this problem incompletely formulated. A correct…

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The problem framed this time is at least partially a classic problem in geometry. You can find a lot in the literature about where this general problem arises in numerous fields of application. Some previous exposure to spherical geometry would probably be helpful, particularly for part (e). Here is the

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We pose a classic problem, variously known as the taxicab problem or the German tank problem (named after its historical application, by Allied forces in World War II, to the estimation of the monthly rate of German tank production from very few data). We have a finite population $\mathcal{X}$ with…

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Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes on the previous problem, which was about phase transitions: If the common probability that each observer tells the truth on any given instance is $p$, and if there are $m$ such observers, and if there are $n$ options (colors) to choose from, then by…

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