Neil Lutz

Julianne Cruz, Sho Glashausser, Neil Lutz

In the setting of multi-head finite-state dimensions, trailing heads lag behind a leading head, accessing past data to aid a finite-state gambler placing bets on successive bits read by the leading head. Cruz, Glashausser, Li, and Lutz (2026) proved that, for any fixed number of trailing heads, adaptive (data-dependent) movement rules can strictly outperform oblivious (data-independent) movement schedules. In this paper we strengthen that separation by proving that a single trailing head with adaptive movements can outperform, by a large and uniform margin, arbitrarily many trailing heads with oblivious movements. Formally, our main theorem states that there is a binary sequence whose adaptive two-head finite-state strong dimension is less than its oblivious multi-head finite-state dimension, and that the gap is greater than 0.3.

Julianne Cruz, Sho Glashausser, Xiaoyuan Li et al.

Multi-head finite-state dimensions and predimensions quantify the predictability of a sequence by a gambler with trailing heads acting as "probes to the past." These additional heads allow the gambler to exploit patterns that are simple but non-local, such as in a sequence $S$ with $S[n]=S[2n]$ for all $n$. In the original definitions of Huang, Li, Lutz, and Lutz (2025), the head movements were required to be oblivious (i.e., data-independent). Here, we introduce a model in which head movements are adaptive (i.e., data-dependent) and compare it to the oblivious model. We establish that for each $h\geq 2$, adaptivity enhances the predictive power of $h$-head finite-state gamblers, in the sense that there are sequences whose oblivious $h$-head finite-state predimensions strictly exceed their adaptive $h$-head finite-state predimensions. We further prove that adaptive finite-state predimensions admit a strict hierarchy as the number of heads increases, and in fact that for all $h\geq 1$ there is a sequence whose adaptive $(h+1)$-head finite-state predimension is strictly less than its adaptive $h$-head predimension.

Christopher Jung, Sampath Kannan, Neil Lutz

When selecting locations for a set of facilities, standard clustering algorithms may place unfair burden on some individuals and neighborhoods. We formulate a fairness concept that takes local population densities into account. In particular, given $k$ facilities to locate and a population of size $n$, we define the "neighborhood radius" of an individual $i$ as the minimum radius of a ball centered at $i$ that contains at least $n/k$ individuals. Our objective is to ensure that each individual has a facility within at most a small constant factor of her neighborhood radius. We present several theoretical results: We show that optimizing this factor is NP-hard; we give an approximation algorithm that guarantees a factor of at most 2 in all metric spaces; and we prove matching lower bounds in some metric spaces. We apply a variant of this algorithm to real-world address data, showing that it is quite different from standard clustering algorithms and outperforms them on our objective function and balances the load between facilities more evenly.

Jack H. Lutz, Neil Lutz, Robyn R. Lutz et al.

Matter, especially DNA, is now programmed to carry out useful processes at the nanoscale. As these programs and processes become more complex and their envisioned safety-critical applications approach deployment, it is essential to develop methods for engineering trustworthiness into molecular programs. Some of this can be achieved by adapting existing software engineering methods, but molecular programming also presents new challenges that will require new methods. This paper presents a method for dealing with one such challenge, namely, the difficulty of ascertaining how robust a molecular program is to perturbations of the relative "clock speeds" of its various reactions. The method proposed here is game-theoretic. The robustness of a molecular program is quantified in terms of its ability to win (achieve its original objective) in games against other molecular programs that manipulate its relative clock speeds. This game-theoretic approach is general enough to quantify the security of a molecular program against malicious manipulations of its relative clock speeds. However, this preliminary report focuses on games against nature, games in which the molecular program's opponent perturbs clock speeds randomly (indifferently) according to the probabilities inherent in chemical kinetics.

Christopher Jung, Sampath Kannan, Neil Lutz

We consider the multi-armed bandit setting with a twist. Rather than having just one decision maker deciding which arm to pull in each round, we have $n$ different decision makers (agents). In the simple stochastic setting, we show that a "free-riding" agent observing another "self-reliant" agent can achieve just $O(1)$ regret, as opposed to the regret lower bound of $Ω(\log t)$ when one decision maker is playing in isolation. This result holds whenever the self-reliant agent's strategy satisfies either one of two assumptions: (1) each arm is pulled at least $γ\ln t$ times in expectation for a constant $γ$ that we compute, or (2) the self-reliant agent achieves $o(t)$ realized regret with high probability. Both of these assumptions are satisfied by standard zero-regret algorithms. Under the second assumption, we further show that the free rider only needs to observe the number of times each arm is pulled by the self-reliant agent, and not the rewards realized. In the linear contextual setting, each arm has a distribution over parameter vectors, each agent has a context vector, and the reward realized when an agent pulls an arm is the inner product of that agent's context vector with a parameter vector sampled from the pulled arm's distribution. We show that the free rider can achieve $O(1)$ regret in this setting whenever the free rider's context is a small (in $L_2$-norm) linear combination of other agents' contexts and all other agents pull each arm $Ω(\log t)$ times with high probability. Again, this condition on the self-reliant players is satisfied by standard zero-regret algorithms like UCB. We also prove a number of lower bounds.