[PHK_seminar] [Cohomology]Wednesday 11 Feb, Tobias Fritz

[Igor Khavkine]

Dear All,

The video recording of the talk by Tobias Fritz from last week is now 
available on YouTube at

   https://youtu.be/18ZuHUaKM88

The slides are available from

   https://users.math.cas.cz/~hvle/PHK/Fritzoptimizing_iid2026.pdf

Both links have also been recorded at the ResearchSeminars announcement

   https://researchseminars.org/talk/PHK-cohomology-seminar/146/


Best,

Igor

On 2/9/26 1:00 PM, sender of seminar announcement via phk_seminar wrote:
> Wednesday, 11 February 2026 - 13:30 to 14:30
> Place: Institute of Mathematics of ASCR, Žitná 25, Praha 1, ZOOM meeting
> 
> Speaker: Tobias Fritz, University of Innsbruck, Austria
> Title: Optimizing over iid distributions and the Beat the Average game
> 
> Abstract
> 
> A casino offers the following game. There are three cups each containing 
> a die. You are being told that the dice in the cups are all the same, 
> but possibly nonstandard. For a bet of $1, the game master shakes all 
> three cups and lets you choose one of them. You win $2 if the die in 
> your cup displays at least the average of the other two, and you lose 
> otherwise. Is this game fair? If not, how should the casino design the 
> dice to maximize their profit?
> 
> 
> In this talk, I will answer this question, explain what it is an example 
> of, and outline our partial results on a more difficult question of the 
> same type: how likely can we make the event X1 + X2 + X3 < 2 X4, given 
> the constraint that the random variables X1, ..., X4 must be iid? 
> Surprisingly, obtaining good bounds involves solving challenging 
> combinatorial optimization problems.
> 
> 
> Based on joint work with Pierre C Bellec (arXiv:2412.15179), which has 
> recently been featured as a test case for the AI tool AlphaEvolve 
> (arXiv:2511.02864).
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> We shall open the ZOOM meeting at 13.15 for (virtual) coffee and close 
> ZOOM at 15.00
> 
> 
> Join Zoom Meeting
> 
> 
> https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99598413922? 
> pwd=YXNFbk50aVhleXhWSGtISFViLytRUT09 <https://cesnet.zoom.us/ 
> j/99598413922?pwd=YXNFbk50aVhleXhWSGtISFViLytRUT09>
> 
> 
> Meeting ID:99598413922
> 
> Passcode:Galois
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, February 8, Rita Fioresi shall give a talk ``Geometric 
> Deep Learning meets Quantum Groups"
> 
> For more information see the seminar web page at
> https://www.math.cas.cz/index.php/events/seminar/16
> 
> Cohomology in algebra, geometry, physics and statistics mailing list
> phk_seminar at math.cas.cz
> https://list.math.cas.cz/listinfo/phk_seminar@math.cas.cz
> 
> 
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