Related papers: Combinatorial Solutions Providing Improved Securit…
Assume that two distant parties, Alice and Bob, as well as an adversary, Eve, have access to (quantum) systems prepared jointly according to a tripartite state. In addition, Alice and Bob can use local operations and authenticated public…
The domatic number of a graph is the maximum number of pairwise disjoint dominating sets admitted by the graph. We introduce a game based around this graph invariant. The domatic number game is played on a graph $G$ by two players, Alice…
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…
This paper considers a game-theoretic formulation of the covert communications problem with finite blocklength, where the transmitter (Alice) can randomly vary her transmit power in different blocks, while the warden (Willie) can randomly…
In this paper, we consider the problem of guessing a sequence subject to a distortion constraint. Specifically, we assume the following game between Alice and Bob: Alice has a sequence $\bx$ of length $n$. Bob wishes to guess $\bx$, yet he…
We consider a card guessing strategy for a stack of cards with two different types of cards, say $m_1$ cards of type red (heart or diamond) and $m_2$ cards of type black (clubs or spades). Given a deck of $M=m_1+m_2$ cards, we propose a…
Mirror games were invented by Garg and Schnieder (ITCS 2019). Alice and Bob take turns (with Alice playing first) in declaring numbers from the set {1,2, ...2n}. If a player picks a number that was previously played, that player loses and…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
In a recent work Conger and Howald derived asymptotic formulas for the randomness, after shuffling, of decks with repeating cards or all-distinct decks dealt into hands. In the latter case the deck does not need to be fully randomized: the…
We consider the numbers arising in the problem of normal ordering of expressions in canonical boson creation and annihilation operators. We treat a general form of a boson string which is shown to be associated with generalizations of…
Suppose that a transmitter Alice potentially wishes to communicate with a receiver Bob over an adversarially jammed binary channel. An active adversary James eavesdrops on their communication over a binary symmetric channel (BSC(q)), and…
Set disjointness is a central problem in communication complexity. Here Alice and Bob each receive a subset of an n-element universe, and they need to decide whether their inputs intersect or not. The communication complexity of this…
The secure "pairing" of wireless devices based on auxiliary or out-of-band (OOB) communication, such as audio, visual, or tactile channels, is a well-established research direction. However, prior work shows that this approach to pairing…
Distributed consensus protocols reach agreement among $n$ players in the presence of $f$ adversaries; different protocols support different values of $f$. Existing works study this problem for different adversary types (captured by threat…
We consider a K-armed bandit problem in general graphs where agents are arbitrarily connected and each of them has limited memorizing capabilities and communication bandwidth. The goal is to let each of the agents eventually learn the best…
Quantum key distribution allows two parties, traditionally known as Alice and Bob, to establish a secure random cryptographic key if, firstly, they have access to a quantum communication channel, and secondly, they can exchange classical…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…
Two parties, Alice and Bob, wish to distill a binary secret key out of a list of correlated variables that they share after running a quantum key distribution protocol based on continuous-spectrum quantum carriers. We present a novel…
We present a scheme for direct and confidential communication between Alice and Bob, where there is no need for establishing a shared secret key first, and where the key used by Alice even will become known publicly. The communication is…
We consider the decentralized exploration problem: a set of players collaborate to identify the best arm by asynchronously interacting with the same stochastic environment. The objective is to insure privacy in the best arm identification…