Related papers: Depth in Bingo Closure
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
We introduce a geometric dynamical system where iteration is defined as a cycling composition of different maps acting on a space composed of three or more lines in $\mathbb{R}^2$. This system is motivated by the dynamics of iterated…
Abalone is a 2-player board game with perfect information. The game is played on a 5x5x5 hexagonal grid and ends when a player pushes 6 of their opponents' pieces off the board. Abalone is similar to games like chess and Go in that all…
Let x and y be points in a billiard table M that is bounded by a curve sigma. We assume that sigma is a simple closed C^r curve with positive curvature, where r is at least 2. A subset B of M\{x,y} is called a blocking set for the pair…
Connect Four is a two-player game where each player attempts to be the first to create a sequence of four of their pieces, arranged horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, by dropping pieces into the columns of a grid of width seven and…
We give the asymptotic growth of the number of primitive periodic trajectories of a two dimensional dispersive billiard, when we prescribe their number of bounces on one of the obstacles.
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 two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner of the game. Such games are central in formal methods since they model the interaction between a…
We study the sample complexity of identifying an approximate equilibrium for two-player zero-sum $n\times 2$ matrix games. That is, in a sequence of repeated game plays, how many rounds must the two players play before reaching an…
Taking the absolute value of consecutive differences of a cyclicly ordered list of integers constitutes a simple dynamical system. For lists of lenght a power of two the process will terminate in all zeros, but examples with arbitarily long…
In the popular computer game of Tetris, the player is given a sequence of tetromino pieces and must pack them into a rectangular gameboard initially occupied by a given configuration of filled squares; any completely filled row of the…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the well known tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) board game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields", each of them being a tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player…
We give lower bound on the number of periodic billiard trajectories inside a generic smooth strictly convex closed surface in 3-space: for odd n, there are at least 2(n-1) such trajectories. We apply a topological approach based on the…
The game of Nim, which has been well known for many years, has numerous variations. One such variation is Circular Nim, where piles of stones are arranged on a circumference, and players take stones from consecutive adjacent piles in one…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…
Rounding border effects at the escape point of open integrable billiards are analyzed via the escape times statistics and emission angles. The model is the rectangular billiard and the shape of the escape point is assumed to have a…
This paper is about the following question: How many riffle shuffles mix a deck of card for games such as blackjack and bridge? An object that comes up in answering this question is the descent polynomial associated with pairs of decks,…
In the game "Super Six", after successfully getting rid of a stick by rolling with the die a number that is not occupied, the player has the choice to continue to roll the die or to stop and to hand over the die to their opponent. The…
Graph pebbling is a game played on a connected graph G. A player purchases pebbles at a dollar a piece, and hands them to an adversary who distributes them among the vertices of G (called a configuration) and chooses a target vertex r. The…
A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…