Mittagsseminar (in cooperation with A. Steger, D. Steurer and B. Sudakov)

Date and Time: Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 12:15 pm

Duration: 30 minutes

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Roger Wattenhofer

Online Matching

Consider an online gaming platform supporting two-player games such as Chess or Street Fighter 4. The platform tries to find a suitable opponent for each player, where all players arrive online. We want to minimize two criteria: (i) we want to match "similar" players, so that the game is challenging for both players; and (ii) the waiting time until a player is matched and can start playing should be as short as possible. It turns out that these two minimization criteria are often conflicting. To cope with this challenge, we must allow the platform to delay decisions.

This talk is based on the STOC 2016 paper "Haste Makes Waste", in collaboration with Yuval Emek and Shay Kutten. However, some technical parts are from a simplified analysis published at SODA 2017. Also: This is my second talk in the Mittagsseminar; my first talk was in 1997!

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