The power of thinning in balanced allocation

Abstract

Balls are sequentially allocated into n bins as follows: for each ball, an independent, uniformly random bin is generated. An overseer may then choose to either allocate the ball to this bin, or else the ball is allocated to a new independent uniformly random bin. The goal of the overseer is to reduce the load of the most heavily loaded bin after $\mathrm{\Theta }(n)$ balls have been allocated. We provide an asymptotically optimal strategy yielding a maximum load of $(1+o(1))\sqrt{\frac{8logn}{loglogn}}$ balls.