Related papers: Twenty Questions Games Always End With Yes
Mean-payoff games play a central role in quantitative synthesis and verification. In a single-dimensional game a weight is assigned to every transition and the objective of the protagonist is to assure a non-negative limit-average weight.…
The Stackelberg equilibrium solution concept describes optimal strategies to commit to: Player 1 (termed the leader) publicly commits to a strategy and Player 2 (termed the follower) plays a best response to this strategy (ties are broken…
It is known that the following five counting problems lead to the same integer sequence~$f_t(n)$: the number of nonequivalent compact Huffman codes of length~$n$ over an alphabet of $t$ letters, the number of `nonequivalent' canonical…
We study the performance of Fictitious Play, when used as a heuristic for finding an approximate Nash equilibrium of a 2-player game. We exhibit a class of 2-player games having payoffs in the range [0,1] that show that Fictitious Play…
The game of the Towers of Hanoi is generalized to binary trees. First, a straightforward solution of the game is discussed. Second, a shorter solution is presented, which is then shown to be optimal.
We give a variety of magic hexagons of Orders from 3 to 7, many of which are extensions of known results. We also give a theorem that their are an infinite number of magic hexagons of Order $n$ for any fixed positive integer $n$ for any…
We study so-called invariant games played with a fixed number $d$ of heaps of matches. A game is described by a finite list $\mathcal{M}$ of integer vectors of length $d$ specifying the legal moves. A move consists in changing the current…
In mean-payoff games, the objective of the protagonist is to ensure that the limit average of an infinite sequence of numeric weights is nonnegative. In energy games, the objective is to ensure that the running sum of weights is always…
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…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
A two-player one-round binary game consists of two cooperative players who each replies by one bit to a message that he receives privately; they win the game if both questions and answers satisfy some predetermined property. A game is…
Consider a situation with $n$ agents or players where some of the players form a coalition with a certain collective objective. Simple games are used to model systems that can decide whether coalitions are successful (winning) or not…
Scholastic trivia competitions test knowledge and intelligence through mastery of question answering. Modern question answering benchmarks are one variant of the Turing test. Specifically, answering a set of questions as well as a human is…
Simple stochastic games are two-player zero-sum stochastic games with turn-based moves, perfect information, and reachability winning conditions. We present two new algorithms computing the values of simple stochastic games. Both of them…
In a guessing game, players guess the value of a random real number selected using some probability density function. The winner may be determined in various ways; for example, a winner can be a player whose guess is closest in magnitude to…
Given a finite structure $M$ and property $p$, it is a natural to study the degree of satisfiability of $p$ in $M$; i.e. to ask: what is the probability that uniformly randomly chosen elements in $M$ satisfy $p$? In group theory, a…
Repeated quantum game theory addresses long term relations among players who choose quantum strategies. In the conventional quantum game theory, single round quantum games or at most finitely repeated games have been widely studied, however…
For a given independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) source, Huffman code achieves the optimal average codeword length in the class of instantaneous code with a single code table. However, it is known that there exist time-variant…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers. We use this decomposition to construct a two-player game. Given a fixed integer $n$ and an initial decomposition of $n=n…
The 21-card trick is a way of dealing cards in order to predict the card selected by a volunteer. We give a mathematical explanation of why the well-known 21-card trick works using a simple linear discrete function. The function has a…