English

On Levine's notorious hat puzzle

Combinatorics 2021-06-29 v8 Computer Science and Game Theory

Abstract

The Levine hat game requires nn players, each wearing an infinite random stack of black and white hats, to guess the location of a black hat on their own head seeing only the hats worn by all the other players. They are allowed a strategy session before the game, but no further communication. The players collectively win if and only if all their guesses are correct. In this paper we give an overview of what is known about strategies for this game, including an extended discussion of the case with n=2n = 2 players (and a conjecture for an optimal strategy in this case). We also prove that VnV_n, the optimal value of the joint success probability in the nn-player game, is a strictly decreasing function of nn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.4711,
  title  = {On Levine's notorious hat puzzle},
  author = {Joe Buhler and Chris Freiling and Ron Graham and Jonathan Kariv and James R. Roche and Mark Tiefenbruck and Clint Van Alten and Dmytro Yeroshkin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.4711},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

To appear in INTEGERS

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:06:43.006Z