Related papers: The Unlucky Door
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 article, we look at a hat-guessing game, in which each player must guess the color of their own hat while only seeing the hats of the other players. We focus on the case of two hat colors and a countably infinite number of players.…
In this paper we consider a scenario where there are several algorithms for solving a given problem. Each algorithm is associated with a probability of success and a cost, and there is also a penalty for failing to solve the problem. The…
In this paper we study the Three Hat Problem which appeared in Puzzle Corner of the Technology Review magazine. This puzzle gives a scenario in which three players wearing hats are sitting together and each hat can be seen by everyone…
This paper introduced a pursuit and evasion game to be played on a connected graph. One player moves invisibly around the graph, and the other player must guess his position. At each time step the second player guesses a vertex, winning if…
We examine a new variant of the classic prisoners and lightswitches puzzle: A warden leads his $n$ prisoners in and out of $r$ rooms, one at a time, in some order, with each prisoner eventually visiting every room an arbitrarily large…
Introducing the simplest of all No-Signalling Games: the RGB Game where two verifiers interrogate two provers, Alice and Bob, far enough from each other that communication between them is too slow to be possible. Each prover may be…
Game versions of the Monty Hall Problem are discussed. The focus is on the principle of eliminating the dominated strategies, both in the zero-sum and noncooperative formulations.
In Newcomb's paradox you choose to receive either the contents of a particular closed box, or the contents of both that closed box and another one. Before you choose, a prediction algorithm deduces your choice, and fills the two boxes based…
Whenever a distinct state is immersed in a sea of complicated and dense states, the strength of the distinct state, which we refer to as a doorway, is distributed in their neighboring states. We analyze this mechanism for 2-D billiards with…
In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…
We consider games with two antagonistic players --- \'Elo\"ise (modelling a program) and Ab\'elard (modelling a byzantine environment) --- and a third, unpredictable and uncontrollable player, that we call Nature. Motivated by the fact that…
Finding a counterfeit coin with the different weight from a set of visually identical coin using a balance, usually a two-armed balance, known as the balance question, is an intersting and inspiring question. Its variants involve…
In allocating objects via lotteries, it is common to consider ordinal rules that rely solely on how agents rank degenerate lotteries. While ordinality is often imposed due to cognitive or informational constraints, we provide another…
We consider a hide-and-seek game between a Hider and a Seeker over a finite set of locations. The Hider chooses one location to conceal a stationary treasure, while the Seeker visits the locations sequentially along a route. As the search…
Kingdomino is introduced as an interesting game for studying game playing: the game is multiplayer (4 independent players per game); it has a limited game depth (13 moves per player); and it has limited but not insignificant interaction…
We prove an interesting fact about Lottery: the winning 6 numbers (out of 49) in the game of the Lottery contain two consecutive numbers with a surprisingly high probability (almost 50%).
The classical constant-sum 'silent duel' game had two antagonistic marksmen walking towards each other. A more friendly formulation has two equally skilled marksmen approaching targets at which they may silently fire at distances of their…
We study tournaments where winning a rank-dependent prize requires passing a minimum performance standard. We show that, for any prize allocation, the optimal standard is always at a mode of performance that is weakly higher than the global…
We introduce a two-player game involving two tokens located at points of a fixed set. The players take turns to move a token to an unoccupied point in such a way that the distance between the two tokens is decreased. Optimal strategies for…