Related papers: Chess, Chance and Conspiracy
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swiss-system chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules for round-robin tournaments of $n$ competitors. Specifically, $n$ competitors are competing for a prize, and a tournament rule $r$ maps the result of all $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches…
An active line of research has considered games played on networks in which payoffs depend on both a player's individual decision and also the decisions of her neighbors. Such games have been used to model issues including the formation of…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…
We study a novel control problem in the context of network coordination games: the individuation of the smallest set of players capable of driving the system, globally, from one Nash equilibrium to another one. Our main contribution is the…
In this paper we analyse tiebreak results from some tennis players in order to investigate whether we are able to identify some strategy in this crucial moment of the game. We compared the observed results with a binomial distribution…
In this paper, we provide a probabilistic analysis of the confidentiality in a card-based protocol. We focus on Bert den Boer's original Five Card Trick to develop our approach. Five Card Trick was formulated as a secure two-party…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
Individual sports competitions provide a natural setting for examining the relative importance of talent and luck/chance in achieving success. The belief that success is primarily due to individual abilities and hard work rather than…
In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…
We present here the new insight or revisiting the algorithm for playing in Chess with incomplete information (which can be recognized by its newly short-name as Phoenix-Chess strategy). The only difference with respect to the classical…
We put forward a new model of congestion games where agents have uncertainty over the routes used by other agents. We take a non-probabilistic approach, assuming that each agent knows that the number of agents using an edge is within a…
Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…
We analyze the structure of the state space of chess by means of transition path sampling Monte Carlo simulation. Based on the typical number of moves required to transpose a given configuration of chess pieces into another, we conclude…
We have seen numerous machine learning methods tackle the game of chess over the years. However, one common element in these works is the necessity of a finely optimized look ahead algorithm. The particular interest of this research lies…
The complexity of chess matches has attracted broad interest since its invention. This complexity and the availability of large number of recorded matches make chess an ideal model systems for the study of population-level learning of a…
The game of chess as always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs. Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability $p_{F}$ for the existence of Maker's strategy to claim a member of $F$ in the unbiased game played on…
This report presents Giraffe, a chess engine that uses self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge, with minimal hand-crafted knowledge given by the programmer. Unlike previous attempts using machine learning only to perform…