English

All or Nothing Caching Games with Bounded Queries

Combinatorics 2017-02-03 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

We determine the value of some search games where our goal is to find all of some hidden treasures using queries of bounded size. The answer to a query is either empty, in which case we lose, or a location, which contains a treasure. We prove that if we need to find dd treasures at nn possible locations with queries of size at most kk, then our chance of winning is kd(nd)\frac{k^d}{\binom nd} if each treasure is at a different location and kd(n+d1d)\frac{k^d}{\binom{n+d-1}d} if each location might hide several treasures for large enough nn. Our work builds on some results by Cs\'oka who has studied a continuous version of this problem, known as Alpern's Caching Game; we also prove that the value of Alpern's Caching Game is kd(n+d1d)\frac{k^d}{\binom{n+d-1}d} for integer kk and large enough nn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1702.00635,
  title  = {All or Nothing Caching Games with Bounded Queries},
  author = {Dömötör Pálvölgyi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.00635},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Comments are welcome. At https://domotorp.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/comments-on-my-paper-about-caching-games - this a new thing that I'm trying, since I often receive emails after I upload a paper to arXiv. The linked post is to discuss anything related to this paper, please visit it and leave a comment!

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:07:37.592Z