Related papers: No Feedback Card Guessing for Top to Random Shuffl…
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…
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…
In the unidimensional unfolding model, given m objects in general position there arise 1+m(m-1)/2 rankings. The set of rankings is called the ranking pattern of the m given objects. By changing these m objects, we can generate various…
Suppose we have $n$ dice, each with $s$ faces (assume $s\geq n$). On the first turn, roll all of them, and remove from play those that rolled an $n$. Roll all of the remaining dice. In general, if at a certain turn you are left with $k$…
Generating payoff matrices of normal-form games at random, we calculate the frequency of games with a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium in the ensemble of $n$-player, $m$-strategy games. These are perfectly predictable as they must…
We analyze the general version of the classic guessing game Mastermind with $n$ positions and $k$ colors. Since the case $k \le n^{1-\varepsilon}$, $\varepsilon>0$ a constant, is well understood, we concentrate on larger numbers of colors.…
The well-known Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles assumes that the cards are initially cut 'about in half' and then riffled together. We analyze a natural variant where the initial cut is biased. Extending results of Fulman…
To count the number of maximum independent arrangements of $n^2$ kings on a $2n\times 2n$ chessboard, we build a $2^n \times (n+1)$ matrix whose entries are independent arrangements of $n$ kings on $2\times 2n$ rectangles. Utilizing upper…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
How many fair coin tosses to choose 1 of $n$ options with uniform probability? Although a probability problem, the solution is essentially number-theoretic, with special roles for Mersenne numbers, Fermat numbers, and the haupt exponent. We…
A very simple heuristic approach to the unfolding problem will be described. An iterative algorithm starts with an empty histogram and every iteration aims to add one entry to this histogram. The entry to be added is selected according to a…
The Thorp shuffle is defined as follows. Cut the deck into two equal piles. Drop the first card from the left pile or the right pile according to the outcome of a fair coin flip; then drop from the other pile. Continue this way until both…
How many shuffles are needed to mix up a deck of cards? This question may be answered in the language of a random walk on the symmetric group, $S_{52}$. This generalises neatly to the study of random walks on finite groups, themselves a…
Ball sort puzzle is a popular logic puzzle consisting of several bins containing balls of multiple colors. Each bin works like a stack; a ball has to follow the last-in first-out order. The player has to sort the balls by color such that…
A single-player game of Memory is played with $n$ distinct pairs of cards, with the cards in each pair bearing identical pictures. The cards are laid face-down. A move consists of revealing two cards, chosen adaptively. If these cards…
Matrices with low-rank structure are ubiquitous in scientific computing. Choosing an appropriate rank is a key step in many computational algorithms that exploit low-rank structure. However, estimating the rank has been done largely in an…
In this paper, we study the biased random transposition shuffle, a natural generalization of the classical random transposition shuffle studied by Diaconis and Shahshahani. We diagonalize the transition matrix of the shuffle and use these…
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…
We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and…
This work is concerned with the study of the Game of Graph Nim -- a class of two-player combinatorial games -- on graphs with $4$ edges. To each edge of such a graph is assigned a positive-integer-valued edge-weight, and during each round…