Abstract
A man walks into a men’s room and observes n empty urinals. Which urinal should he pick so as to maximize his chances of maintaining privacy, i.e., minimize the chance that someone will occupy a urinal beside him? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question under a variety of models for standard men’s room behavior. Our results suggest that for the most part one should probably choose the urinal furthest from the door (with some interesting exceptions). We also suggest a number of variations on the problem that lead to many open problems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
American Restroom Association, Public Restroom Design Issues, http://www.americanrestroom.org/design/index.htm
Decker, D.: A Woman’s Guide on How to Pee Standing Up, http://web.archive.org/web/20031202020806/http://www.restrooms.org/standing.html
Flajolet, P.: A Seating Arrangement Problem, http://algo.inria.fr/libraries/autocomb/fatmen-html/fatmen1.html
Freedman, D., Shepp, L.: An Unfriendly Seating Arrangement Problem. SIAM Review 4, 150 (1962)
Friedman, H.D., Rothman, D.: Solution to An Unfriendly Seating Arrangement Problem. SIAM Review 6, 180–182 (1964)
Georgiou, K., Kranakis, E., Krizanc, D.: Random Maximal Independent Sets and the Unfriendly Theater Arrangement Problem. Discrete Mathematics 309, 5120–5129 (2009)
Hoffman, L.: Computers and Privacy: A Survey. Computing Surveys 1, 85–103 (1969)
International Code Council, International Plumbing Code (2009)
Keane, M., Kranakis, E., Krizanc, D., Narayanan, L.: Routing on Delay Tolerant Sensor Networks. In: Algosensors 2009, pp. 155–166 (2009)
Kleinrock, L.: Queueing Systems, Volume 1: Theory. Wiley, Hoboken (1975)
Knuth, D.: The Toilet Paper Problem. American Math. Monthly 91, 365–370 (1984)
MacKenzie, J.K.: Sequential Filling of a Line by Intervals Placed at Random and Its Application to Linear Absorption. Journal of Chemical Physics 37, 723–728 (1962)
Paola, C.: A Survey of Obnoxious Facility Location Problems. TR-99-11, University of Pisa, Dept. of Informatics (1999)
Ross, S.M.: Stochastic Processes, 2nd edn. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chichester (1996)
Soifer, S.: The Evolution of the Bathroom and the Implications for Paruresis, http://paruresis.org/evolution.pdf
Vogt, R., Nascimento, M.A., Harns, J.: On the Tradeoff between User-Location Privacy and Queried-Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks. In: AdHoc Now 2009, pp. 241–254 (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kranakis, E., Krizanc, D. (2010). The Urinal Problem. In: Boldi, P., Gargano, L. (eds) Fun with Algorithms. FUN 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6099. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13122-6_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13122-6_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13121-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13122-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)