2018/03/30 by Shaun Sullivan, Sullivan, Shaun, Erik Insko +1 · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Archaeology and Historical Studies #Botanical Research and Chemistry #Combinatorics (math.CO) #FOS: Mathematics #Medieval and Classical Philosophy
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1803.11340
openalex publication_date 2018/03/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the Feline Josephus problem, soldiers stand in a circle, each having ℓ `lives'. Going around the circle, a life is taken from every kth soldier; soldiers with 0 lives remaining are removed from the circle. Finding the last surviving soldier proves to be an interesting and difficult problem, even in the case when ℓ=1. In our variant of the Feline Josephus problem, we instead remove a life from k consecutive soldiers, and skip 1 soldier. In certain cases, we find closed formulas for the surviving soldier and hint at a way of finding such solutions in other cases.