Removable Online Knapsack and Advice

In the proportional knapsack problem, we are given a knapsack of some capacity and a set of variably sized items. The goal is to pack a selection of these items that fills the knapsack as much as possible. The online version of this problem reveals the items and their sizes not all at once but one by one. For each item, the algorithm has to decide immediately whether to pack it or not. We consider a natural variant of this online knapsack problem, which has been coined removable knapsack. It differs from the classical variant by allowing the removal of any packed item from the knapsack. Repacking is impossible, however: Once an item is removed, it is gone for good. We analyze the advice complexity of this problem. It measures how many advice bits an omniscient oracle needs to provide for an online algorithm to reach any given competitive ratio, which is - understood in its strict sense - just the algorithm’s approximation factor. The online knapsack problem is known for its peculiar advice behavior involving three jumps in competitivity. We show that the advice complexity of the version with removability is quite different but just as interesting: The competitivity starts from the golden ratio when no advice is given. It then drops down to 1+ε for a constant amount of advice already, which requires logarithmic advice in the classical version. Removability comes as no relief to the perfectionist, however: Optimality still requires linear advice as before. These results are particularly noteworthy from a structural viewpoint for the exceptionally slow transition from near-optimality to optimality. Our most important and demanding result shows that the general knapsack problem, which allows an item’s value to differ from its size, exhibits a similar behavior for removability, but with an even more pronounced jump from an unbounded competitive ratio to near-optimality within just constantly many advice bits. This is a unique behavior among the problems considered in the literature so far. An advice analysis is interesting in its own right, as it allows us to measure the information content of a problem and leads to structural insights. But it also provides insurmountable lower bounds, applicable to any kind of additional information about the instances, including predictions provided by machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence. Unexpectedly, advice algorithms are useful in various real-life situations, too. For example, they provide smart strategies for cooperation in winner-take-all competitions, where several participants pool together to implement different strategies and share the obtained prize. Further illustrating the versatility of our advice-complexity bounds, our results automatically improve some of the best known lower bounds on the competitive ratio for removable knapsack with randomization. The presented advice algorithms also automatically yield deterministic algorithms for established deterministic models such as knapsack with a resource buffer and various problems with more than one knapsack. In their seminal paper introducing removability to the knapsack problem, Iwama and Taketomi have indeed proposed a multiple knapsack problem for which we can establish a one-to-one correspondence with the advice model; this paper therefore even provides a comprehensive analysis for this up until now neglected problem.