Related papers: Chess, Chance and Conspiracy
Wagering mechanisms are one-shot betting mechanisms that elicit agents' predictions of an event. For deterministic wagering mechanisms, an existing impossibility result has shown incompatibility of some desirable theoretical properties. In…
In a strong game played on the edge set of a graph G there are two players, Red and Blue, alternating turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of G (with Red playing first). The winner is the first one to claim all the edges of some…
Ladder tournaments are widely used to rank individuals in real-world organizations and games. Their mathematical properties however are still poorly understood. We formalize the ranking rule generated by a ladder tournament, and we show…
The stable marriage problem, as addressed by Gale and Shapely [1] consists of providing a bipartite matching between n " boys " and n " girls "-each of whom have a totally ordered preference list over the other set-such that there exists no…
We introduce a betting game, where the gambler aims to guess the last success epoch from past observed data. The player may bet on the event that no further successes occur, or choose a `trap' which is any span of future times. In the…
Modern chess engines significantly outperform human players and are essential for evaluating positions and move quality. These engines assign a numerical evaluation $E$ to positions, indicating an advantage for either white or black, but…
A tournament organizer must select one of $n$ possible teams as the winner of a competition after observing all $\binom{n}{2}$ matches between them. The organizer would like to find a tournament rule that simultaneously satisfies the…
Guessing games for directed graphs were introduced by Riis for studying multiple unicast network coding problems. In a guessing game, the players toss generalised dice and can see some of the other outcomes depending on the structure of an…
The laws of chance are often subtle and deceptive. This is why games of chance work. People are convinced that they obey seemingly intuitive laws, while the underlying mathematical structure reveals a different and more complex reality.…
Curiously overlooked in physics is its dependence on the transmission of numbers. For example the transmission of numerical clock readings is implicit in the concept of a coordinate system. The transmission of numbers and other logical…
The game of Knockout is a classic playground game played with two basketballs. This paper uses a Markov process to analyze each player's probability of winning the game given their starting position in line and shooting percentages,…
The Maker-Breaker connectivity game and Hamilton cycle game belong to the best studied games in positional games theory, including results on biased games, games on random graphs and fast winning strategies. Recently, the Connector-Breaker…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…
We construct games of chance from simpler games of chance. We show that it may happen that the simpler games of chance are fair or unfavourable to a player andyet the new combined game is favourable -- this is a counter-intuitive…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
The number of ``carries'' when $n$ random integers are added forms a Markov chain [23]. We show that this Markov chain has the same transition matrix as the descent process when a deck of $n$ cards is repeatedly riffle shuffled. This gives…
Consider an undirected graph modeling a social network, where the vertices represent users, and the edges do connections among them. In the competitive diffusion game, each of a number of players chooses a vertex as a seed to propagate…
Positions of chess players in intransitive (rock-paper-scissors) relations are considered. Namely, position A of White is preferable (it should be chosen if choice is possible) to position B of Black, position B of Black is preferable to…
One of the major breakthroughs in science of the last (20th) century was building a bridge between the worlds of stochastic (random) systems and deterministic (dynamical) systems. It was started by the celebrated 1958 paper by…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…