English

On cases where Litt's game is fair

Combinatorics 2025-01-06 v2 Probability

Abstract

A fair coin is flipped nn times, and two finite sequences of heads and tails (words) AA and BB of the same length are given. Each time the word AA appears in the sequence of coin flips, Alice gets a point, and each time the word BB appears, Bob gets a point. Who is more likely to win? This puzzle is a slight extension of Litt's game that recently set Twitter abuzz. We show that Litt's game is fair for any value of nn and any two words that have the same auto-correlation structure by building up a bijection that exchanges Bob and Alice scores; the fact that the inter-correlation does not come into play in this case may come up as a surprise.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.20049,
  title  = {On cases where Litt's game is fair},
  author = {Anne-Laure Basdevant and Olivier Hénard and Edouard Maurel-Segala and Arvind Singh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.20049},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

9 pages, conjecture 1 is sharpened

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:22:50.425Z