Related papers: The equalization probability of the Polya urn
Unlike tic-tac-toe or checkers, in which optimal play leads to a draw, it is not known whether optimal play in chess ends in a win for White, a win for Black, or a draw. But after White moves first in chess, if Black has a double move…
Inspired by the Japanese game Pachinko, we study simple (perfectly "inelastic" collisions) dynamics of a unit ball falling amidst point obstacles (pins) in the plane. A classic example is that a checkerboard grid of pins produces the…
For a set $A$ of points in the plane, not all collinear, we denote by ${\rm tr}(A)$ the number of triangles in any triangulation of $A$; that is, ${\rm tr}(A) = 2i+b-2$ where $b$ and $i$ are the numbers of points of $A$ in the boundary and…
We study a sequential coin-flipping game in which a player starts with~$n$ coins, each landing heads independently with probability~$p$. In each round the player flips all remaining coins and must set aside at least one coin showing heads;…
In coin tossing two remote participants want to share a uniformly distributed random bit. At the least in the quantum version, each participant test whether or not the other has attempted to create a bias on this bit. It is requested that,…
Winning probabilities of The Hat Game (Ebert's Hat Problem) with three players and three colors are only known in the symmetric case: all probabilities of the colors are equal. This paper solves the asymmetric case: probabilities may be…
Suppose you can color $n$ \emph{biased} coins with $n$ colors, all coins having the same bias. It is forbidden to color both sides of a coin with the same color, but all other colors are allowed. Let $X$ be the number of different colors…
Each voter $i \in I$ has $\alpha_i$ cards that (s)he distributes among the candidates $a \in A$ as a measure of approval. One (or several) candidate(s) who received the maximum number of cards is (are) elected. We provide polynomial…
In this paper, we study the problem of splitting fairly bundles of items. We show that given $n$ bundles with $m$ kinds of items in them, it is possible to distribute the value of each kind of item fairly among $r$ persons by breaking apart…
Consider throwing $n$ balls at random into $m$ urns, each ball landing in urn $i$ with probability $p_i$. Let $S$ be the resulting number of singletons, i.e., urns containing just one ball. We give an error bound for the Kolmogorov distance…
Among other things, we prove that, for a doubling weight $w$, $0< p\leq\infty$, $r\in{\mathbb N}_0$, and $0<\alpha <r+1 - 1/\lambda_p$, we have \[ E_n(f)_{p, w_n} = O(n^{-\alpha}) \iff \omega_\varphi^{r+1}(f, n^{-1})_{p, w_n} =…
Conventional and current wisdom assumes that the brain represents probability as a continuous number to many decimal places. This assumption seems implausible given finite and scarce resources in the brain. Quantization is an information…
In a balls-in-bins process with feedback, balls are sequentially thrown into bins so that the probability that a bin with n balls obtains the next ball is proportional to f(n) for some function f. A commonly studied case where there are two…
This is a research endeavor in two parts. We study a class of balanced urn schemes on balls of two colours (say white and black). At each drawing, a sample of size $m\ge 1$ is drawn from the urn, and ball addition rules are applied. We…
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…
Toral introduced so-called cooperative Parrondo games, in which there are N players (3 or more) arranged in a circle. At each turn one player is randomly chosen to play. He plays either game A or game B. Game A results in a win or loss of…
We count the number and patterns of pairs and tuples of independent events in a simple random experiment: first a fair coin is flipped and then a fair die is tossed. The first number, equal to 888,888, suggest that there are some open…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…