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I consider the natural infinitary variations of the games Wordle and Mastermind, as well as their game-theoretic variations Absurdle and Madstermind, considering these games with infinitely long words and infinite color sequences and…

In this paper we study the mixing time of a biased transpositions shuffle on a set of $N$ cards with $N/2$ cards of two types. For a parameter $0<a \le 1$, one type of card is chosen to transpose with a bias of $\frac{a}{N}$ and the other…

A simple method to produce a random order type is to take the order type of a random point set. We conjecture that many probability distributions on order types defined in this way are heavily concentrated and therefore sample inefficiently…

Suppose we place checkers in the lower left corner of a Go board and wish to move them to the upper right corner in as few moves as possible, where the pieces move as in the game of Chinese checkers. Auslander, Benjamin, and Wilkerson in…

Classification and Regression Trees (CARTs) are off-the-shelf techniques in modern Statistics and Machine Learning. CARTs are traditionally built by means of a greedy procedure, sequentially deciding the splitting predictor variable(s) and…

Research in secure multi-party computation using a deck of playing cards, often called card-based cryptography, dates back to 1989 when Den Boer introduced the "five-card trick" to compute the logical AND function. Since then, many…

For graphs F and G an F-matching in G is a subgraph of G consisting of pairwise vertex disjoint copies of F. The number of F-matchings in G is denoted by s(F,G). We show that for every fixed positive integer m and every fixed tree F, the…

We consider a game in which two separate laboratories collaborate to prepare a quantum system and are then asked to guess the outcome of a measurement performed by a third party in a random basis on that system. Intuitively, by the…

The game of Go has a long history in East Asian countries, but the field of Computer Go has yet to catch up to humans until the past couple of years. While the rules of Go are simple, the strategy and combinatorics of the game are immensely…

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…

In a recently introduced coset guessing game, Alice plays against Bob and Charlie, aiming to meet a joint winning condition. Bob and Charlie can only communicate before the game starts to devise a joint strategy. The game we consider begins…

We develop a formalism to address statistical pattern recognition of graph valued data. Of particular interest is the case of all graphs having the same number of uniquely labeled vertices. When the vertex labels are latent, such graphs are…

A growing random graph is constructed by successively sampling without replacement an element from the pool of virtual vertices and edges. At start of the process the pool contains $N$ virtual vertices and no edges. Each time a vertex is…

We consider the problem of guessing a random, finite-alphabet, secret $n$-vector, where the guesses are transmitted via a noisy channel. We provide a single-letter formula for the best achievable exponential growth rate of the $\rho$--th…

We introduce and analyze the $S_k$ shuffle on $N$ cards, a natural generalization of the celebrated random adjacent transposition shuffle. In the $S_k$ shuffle, we choose uniformly at random a block of $k$ consecutive cards, and shuffle…

We study the generalization of the game Lights Out in which the standard square grid board is replaced by a graph. We examine the probability that, when a graph is chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices and $e$…

We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the optimal strategy. The exact blackjack…

Penney's game is a two player zero-sum game in which each player chooses a three-flip pattern of heads and tails and the winner is the player whose pattern occurs first in repeated tosses of a fair coin. Because the players choose…

The semi-random graph process is a single player game in which the player is initially presented an empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a vertex $u$ is presented to the player independently and uniformly at random. The player then…

We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…