Related papers: The Three Hat Problem
In this paper we study the art gallery problem, which is one of the fundamental problems in computational geometry. The objective is to place a minimum number of guards inside a simple polygon such that the guards together can see the whole…
The napkin problem was first posed by John H. Conway, and written up as a `toughie' in "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection," by Peter Winkler. To paraphrase Winkler's book, there is a banquet dinner to be served at a…
Consider the following hat guessing game. A bear sits on each vertex of a graph $G$, and a demon puts on each bear a hat colored by one of $h$ colors. Each bear sees only the hat colors of his neighbors. Based on this information only, each…
The 3x+ 1 problem concerns iteration of the map on the integers given by T(n) = (3n+1)/2 if n is odd; T(n) = n/2 if n is even. The 3x+1 Conjecture asserts that for every positive integer n > 1 the forward orbit of n under iteration by T…
We present an analysis of a coin-tossing problem posed by Daniel Litt which has generated some popular interest. We demonstrate a recursive identity which leads to relatively simple formulas for the excess number of wins for one player over…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
The aim of this paper is to solve the "gift exchange" problem: you are one of n players, and there are n wrapped gifts on display; when your turn comes, you can either choose any of the remaining wrapped gifts, or you can "steal" a gift…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
We present and analyze PackIt!, a turn-based game consisting of packing rectangles on an $n \times n$ grid. PackIt! can be easily played on paper, either as a competitive two-player game or in \emph{solitaire} fashion. On the $t$-th turn, a…
It is well known that the P3P problem could have 1, 2, 3 and at most 4 positive solutions under different configurations among its 3 control points and the position of the optical center. Since in any real applications, the knowledge on the…
Consider a game involving a team with $n$ players, $k$ of which wear shirts marked with a letter $A$, while the others with a letter $B$, and such that only $s$ people play, while the remaining $n-s$ wait outside the court. At certain times…
Inspired by a chessboard puzzle of Dudeney, the general position problem in graph theory asks for a largest set $S$ of vertices in a graph such that no three elements of $S$ lie on a common shortest path. The number of vertices in such a…
Hedge has been proposed as an adaptive scheme, which guides an agent's decision in resource selection and distribution problems that can be modeled as a multi-armed bandit full information game. Such problems are encountered in the areas of…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
We introduce the concept of a threefold Post correspondence system (3PCS for short) and we consider it as an instance of the threefold Post correspondence problem. With each 3PCS, we associate three Post correspondence systems, i.e., three…
In the gift exchange game there are n players and n wrapped gifts. When a player's number is called, that person can either choose one of the remaining wrapped gifts, or can "steal" a gift from someone who has already unwrapped it, subject…
This paper presents an efficient algorithm to solve the sleeping bandit with multiple plays problem in the context of an online recommendation system. The problem involves bounded, adversarial loss and unknown i.i.d. distributions for arm…
The Sleeping Beauty Problem remains a paradoxical problem that penetrates multiple disciplines that include probability theory, self-locating belief, decision theory, cognitive science, the philosophy of mathematics and science. It asks the…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…