Related papers: How to Play Dundee
We consider the Last-Success-Problem with $n$ independent Bernoulli random variables with parameters $p_i>0$. We improve the lower bound provided by F.T. Bruss for the probability of winning and provide an alternative proof to the one given…
We study the complexity of solving two-player infinite duration games played on a fixed finite graph, where the control of a node is not predetermined but rather assigned randomly. In classic random-turn games, control of each node is…
We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…
Suppose a gambler starts with a fortune in (0,1) and wishes to attain a fortune of 1 by making a sequence of bets. Assume thay whenever the gambler stakes the amount s, the gambler's fortune increases by s with probability w and decreases…
The game show Lucky 13 differs from other television game shows in that contestants are required to place a bet on their own knowledge of trivia by selecting a range that contains the number of questions that they answered correctly. We…
We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
The original Parrondo game, denoted as AB3, contains two independent games: A and B. The winning or losing of A and B game is defined by the change of one unit of capital. Game A is a losing game if played continuously, with winning…
We give explicit formulas for ruin probabilities in a multidimensional Generalized Gambler's ruin problem. The generalization is best interpreted as a game of one player against $d$ other players, allowing arbitrary winning and losing…
Mahjong is a very popular tile-based game commonly played by four players. Each player begins with a hand of 13 tiles and, in turn, players draw and discard (i.e., change) tiles until they complete a legal hand using a 14th tile. In this…
In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…
Consider $2k-1$ voters, each of which has a preference ranking between $n$ given alternatives. An alternative $A$ is called a Condorcet winner, if it wins against every other alternative $B$ in majority voting (meaning that for every other…
A common format for sports contests involves pairwise matches between two teams, with the #1 player of team A matched against the #1 player of team B, the #2 player of team A against the #2 player of team B, and so on. This paper addresses…
We consider various probabilistic games with piles for one player or two players. In each round of the game, a player randomly chooses to add $a$ or $b$ chips to his pile under the condition that $a$ and $b$ are not necessarily positive. If…
Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…
We settle a version of the conjecture about intransitive dice posed by Conrey, Gabbard, Grant, Liu and Morrison in 2016 and Polymath in 2017. We consider generalized dice with $n$ faces and we say that a die $A$ beats $B$ if a random face…
This paper considers the effect of riffle shuffling on decks of cards, allowing for some cards to be indistinguishable from other cards. The dual problem of dealing a game with hands, such as bridge or poker, is also considered. The…
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…
The following problem is considered. Two players are each required to allocate a quota of~$n$ counters among~$k$ boxes labelled~$1,2,\ldots,k$. At times $t=1,2,3,\ldots$ a random box is identified; the probability of choosing box~$i$…