The tennis ball problem

[摘要] Mallows and Shapiro, (J. Integer Sequences 2 (1999)) have recently considered what they dubbed the problem of balls on the lawn. Our object is to explore a natural generalization, the s-tennis ball problem, which reduces to that considered by Mallows and Shapiro in the case s = 2. We show how this generalization is connected with s-ary trees, and employ the notion of generating trees to obtain a solution expressed in terms of generating functions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

[发布日期] 2002-08-01

[关键词] s-ary trees;generating trees;generating functions