Related papers: Twenty Questions Games Always End With Yes

Duch\^ene and Rigo introduced the notion of invariance for take-away games on heaps. Roughly speaking, these are games whose rulesets do not depend on the position. Given a sequence $S$ of positive tuples of integers, the question of…

This document is an exposition of an assortment of open problems arising from the exact enumeration of (perfect) matchings of finite graphs. Roughly half have been solved at the time of this writing; see the document "Twenty Open Problems…

The $k$-majority game is played with $n$ numbered balls, each coloured with one of two colours. It is given that there are at least $k$ balls of the majority colour, where $k$ is a fixed integer greater than $n/2$. On each turn the player…

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 give a simple and short proof of the fact that the board game of Y cannot end in a draw. Our proof, based on the analogous result for the game of Hex (the so-called 'Hex Theorem'), is purely topological and does not depend on the shape…

Huffman coding finds a prefix code that minimizes mean codeword length for a given probability distribution over a finite number of items. Campbell generalized the Huffman problem to a family of problems in which the goal is to minimize not…

The number of "nonequivalent" Huffman codes of length r over an alphabet of size t has been studied frequently. Equivalently, the number of "nonequivalent" complete t-ary trees has been examined. We first survey the literature, unifying…

Every positive integer may be written uniquely as a base-$\beta$ decomposition--that is a legal sum of powers of $\beta$--where $\beta$ is the dominating root of a non-increasing positive linear recurrence sequence. Guided by earlier work…

The halting problem is undecidable --- but can it be solved for "most" inputs? This natural question was considered in a number of papers, in different settings. We revisit their results and show that most of them can be easily proven in a…

This thesis investigates the extent to which the optimal value of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) can be approximated by some sentence of fixed point logic with counting (FPC). It is known that, assuming $\mathsf{P} \neq…

Huffman coding is well known to be useful in certain decision problems involving minimizing the average number of (freely chosen) queries to determine an unknown random variable. However, in problems where the queries are more constrained,…

There are n people, each of whom is either a knight or a spy. It is known that at least k knights are present, where n/2 < k < n. Knights always tell the truth. We consider both spies who always lie and spies who answer as they see fit.…

There are many papers written on the Two Envelopes Problem that usually study some of its variations. In this paper we will study and compare the most significant variations of the problem. We will see the correct decisions for each player…

Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…

Bidding chess is a chess variant where instead of alternating play, players bid for the opportunity to move. Generalizing a known result on so-called Richman games, we show that for a natural class of games including bidding chess, each…

We show how two techniques from statistical physics can be adapted to solve a variant of the notorious Unique Games problem, potentially opening new avenues towards the Unique Games Conjecture. The variant, which we call Count Unique Games,…

In this paper, some new criteria for detecting whether a finite game is potential are proposed by solving potential equations. The verification equations with the minimal number for checking a potential game are obtained for the first time.…

In this paper, we find a bound for the number of the positive solutions to the titled equation, improving a result of Togb\'e. As a consequence, we prove a conjecture of Togb\'e in a few cases.

This brief paper describes the single-player card game called "Perpetual Motion" and reports on a computational analysis of the game's outcome. The analysis follows a Monte Carlo methodology based on a sample of 10,000 randomly generated…

We study the problem of computing an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium in repeated games. Earlier work by Borgs et al. [2010] suggests that this problem is intractable. We show that if we make a slight change to their model---modeling the players…