CS 174 Combinatorics and Discrete Probability

Spring 2018 Eric Friedman HW 1

Due Friday 2/2, noon.

Instructions: Problem sets are due at 12:00 on Friday on gradescope. Late submission (up to 48 hours
- Sunday) will be penalized one grade. You are strongly encouraged to type out your solutions using LATEX.
You may also want to consider using mathematical mode typing in some office suite if you are not familiar
with LATEX. If you must handwrite your homeworks, please write clearly and legibly. We will not grade
homeworks that are unreadable. You are encouraged to work in groups of 2-3, but you must write solutions
on your own. List your study partners for homework on the first page, or none if you had no partners.

Note: You must justify all your answers. In particular, you will get no credit if you simply write the final
answer without any explanation.

1. (Exercise 1.1 from MU) We flip a fair coin ten times. Find the probability of the following events.

(a) The number of heads and the number of tails are equal.
(b) There are more heads than tails.
(c) The ith flip and the (11 − i)th flip are the same for i = 1, . . . , 5.
(d) We flip at least four consecutive heads.

F) ≥ Pr(E) + Pr(F) − 1.
S
2. Let E and F be events. Prove: Pr(E

3. Consider a probabilistic test for whether AB = C. Given three n × n matrices A, B,C, we want to verify if
AB = C. The algorithm chooses two random vectors x, y uniformly at random from {0, 1}n , and computes
xT ABy, xT Cy. If they are not the same, the algorithm declares AB 6= C, otherwise it declares AB = C. Give
an upper bound of the error probability of this test.

4. Suppose 3 coins are tossed. Each coin has an equal probability of head or tail, but are not independent.

(a) What are the minimum and maximum values of the probability of three heads?
(b) Now assume that all pairs of coins are mutually independent. What are the minimum and maximum
values of the probability of three heads?

5. Let E1 , . . . , Ek be some events in a probability space. Recall that by definition, they are mutually indepen-
dent if and only if for any subset I ⊆ {1, . . . , k}, Pr( i∈I Ei ) = ∏i∈I Pr(Ei ).
T

(a) Prove that E1 , . . . , Ek are mutually independent if and only if E1 , . . . , Ek−1 , Ek are mutually independent,
where Ei denotes the complement of Ei .

CS 174, Spring 2018, HW 1 1

 (b) Prove that E1 , . . . , Ek are mutually independent if and only if for any I ⊆ {1, . . . , k},
 
\  \ 
Pr Ei ∩ Ei = ∏ Pr(Ei ) ∏(1 − Pr(Ei )).
i∈I i6∈I i∈I i6∈I

(Hint: use induction.)

6. Here are some problems based on the randomized min-cut algorithm discussed in class. Assume the graph
is connected throughout the problem.

(a) A graph may have more than one minimum cut. Using the analysis of the error probability of the
randomized min-cut algorithm, show that the number of distinct minimum cuts is at most n(n − 1)/2.
(b) Suppose that the algorithm is modified as follows. Rather than picking an edge uniformly at random
and merging its endpoints, the algorithm picks a pair of vertices (not necessarily adjacent) uniformly
at random and merges them. Give a family of connected graphs Gn (where Gn has n vertices for each
n) such that when the modified algorithm is run on Gn the probability that it finds a minimum cut is
exponentially small in n. ( By “exponentially small” we mean that the probability is less than cn for
some constant c < 1 and all sufficiently large n.)
(c) Show that an exponential number of repeated trials of the algorithm of part (b) would be needed in
order to reduce the error probability to 21 .
(d) Consider the variant of the min-cut problem where the edges have weights associated with them, and
the value of the cut is the sum of the weights of edges in the cut. Modify the algorithm in class to work
in this case.

CS 174, Spring 2018, HW 1 2