Related papers: Twenty Questions Games Always End With Yes
Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is…
We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of…
The Nakamura number of a simple game plays a critical role in preference aggregation (or multi-criterion ranking): the number of alternatives that the players can always deal with rationally is less than this number. We comprehensively…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the game. We study {\em bidding games} in which the players bid for the right to move the token.…
Let f(1)=1, and let f(n+1)=2^{2^{f(n)}} for every positive integer n. We conjecture that if a system S \subseteq {x_i \cdot x_j=x_k: i,j,k \in {1,...,n}} \cup {x_i+1=x_k: i,k \in {1,...,n}} has only finitely many solutions in non-negative…
The payoff in the Chow-Robbins coin-tossing game is the proportion of heads when you stop. Knowing when to stop to maximize expectation was addressed by Chow and Robbins(1965), who proved there exist integers ${k_n}$ such that it is optimal…
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…
The Taxman game has proven to be hard to solve optimally, so efforts have been made to find heuristic strategies that do well in practice. We present results on the NP-hardness of a variant of the game via an equivalence to a particular…
This paper studies the game of guessing riffle-shuffled cards with complete feedback. A deck of $n$ cards labelled 1 to $n$ is riffle-shuffled once and placed on a table. A player tries to guess the cards from top and is given complete…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer can be expressed as the sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers. This theorem inspired a beautiful game, the Zeckendorf Game. Two players begin with $n \ 1$'s and take turns applying rules…
In this article, we prove the completeness of the following game search algorithms: unbounded best-first minimax with completion and descent with completion, i.e. we show that, with enough time, they find the best game strategy. We then…
In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g. correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where…
We consider a randomized algorithm for the unique games problem, using independent multinomial probabilities to assign labels to the vertices of a graph. The expected value of the solution obtained by the algorithm is expressed as a…
Zeckendorf proved that any positive integer has a unique decomposition as a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers, indexed by $F_1 = 1, F_2 = 2, F_{n+1} = F_n + F_{n-1}$. Motivated by this result, Baird, Epstein, Flint, and Miller…
The main result is the following: Let X be a finite set and D be a non empty family of choice functions for (X choose 2) closed under permutation of X. Then the following conditions are equivalent: (A) for any choice function c on (X choose…
Huffman coding is known to be optimal, yet its dynamic version may be even more efficient in practice. A new variant of Huffman encoding has been proposed recently, that provably always performs better than static Huffman coding by at least…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…
On March 16, 2024, Daniel Litt, in an X-post, proposed the following brainteaser: "Flip a fair coin 100 times. It gives a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). For each HH in the sequence of flips, Alice gets a point; for each HT, Bob does,…
We analyze the classic board game of Mastermind with $n$ holes and a constant number of colors. A result of Chv\'atal (Combinatorica 3 (1983), 325-329) states that the codebreaker can find the secret code with $\Theta(n / \log n)$…
Consider a bin containing $n$ balls colored with two colors. In a $k$-query, $k$ balls are selected by a questioner and the oracle's reply is related (depending on the computation model being considered) to the distribution of colors of the…