Information Theoretic Cutting of a Cake

Cake Cutting ∗

In the 2nd world war, if you’re a collection of Polish mathematicians sitting out the war in Lvov, your thoughts naturally turn to ... cake. Or more precisely, how to cut a cake. This is the beginning of what we now call the problem of “fair division”. Fair division algorithms are examples of what we might now call a mechanism, much like an auction. These are protocols designed to allocate reso...

A note on cake cutting

The algorithmic aspects of the following problem are investigated: n (22) persons want to cut a cake into n shares so that every person will get at least l/n of the cake by his own measure and so that the number of cuts made on the cake is minimal. The cutting process is to be governed by a protocol (computer program). It is shown that no deterministic protocol exists which is fair (in a sense ...

Cake-Cutting is Not a Pie e of Cake

Cake-Cutting Is Not a Piece of Cake

Fair cake-cutting is the division of a cake or resource among N users so that each user is content. Users may value a given piece of cake differently, and information about how a user values different parts of the cake can only be obtained by requesting users to “cut” pieces of the cake into specified ratios. One of the most interesting open questions is to determine the minimum number of cuts ...

13 Cake Cutting Algorithms

Imagine a cake that must be divided between a group of gluttonous children. To complicate matters, the cake is heterogeneous: two pieces of cake may differ in terms of their toppings, so the children have different preferences over the pieces (one may weakly prefer a larger proportion of chocolate curls, while another may single-mindedly desire the piece with the cherry). In this chapter we dis...