{"paper":{"title":"Fano Geometry and Slow Coupon Collecting","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["math.PR"],"primary_cat":"math.CO","authors_text":"Daniel Berend, Dina Barak-Pelleg","submitted_at":"2026-06-26T16:06:11Z","abstract_excerpt":"We study the coupon collector's problem in a generalized setting where each draw reveals a fixed number of coupons and the sampling mechanism is required to be \\emph{fair}, meaning that every coupon appears with the same frequency among the admissible draws. Grunbaum and Yaakobi conjectured that, among all fair mechanisms with fixed parameters, the fully random model maximizes the expected time to complete coverage. We disprove this conjecture by exhibiting explicit counterexamples arising from finite geometry. In particular, we show that the line set of the Fano plane yields a fair mechanism "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.28216","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.28216/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}