Related papers: Matching expectations
The 2048 game involves tiles labeled with powers of two that can be merged to form bigger powers of two; variants of the same puzzle involve similar merges of other tile values. We analyze the maximum score achievable in these games by…
First cycle games (FCG) are played on a finite graph by two players who push a token along the edges until a vertex is repeated, and a simple cycle is formed. The winner is determined by some fixed property Y of the sequence of labels of…
Consider concurrent, infinite duration, two-player win/lose games played on graphs. If the winning condition satisfies some simple requirement, the existence of Player 1 winning (finite-memory) strategies is equivalent to the existence of…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
Juggling patterns can be described by a sequence of cards which keep track of the relative order of the balls at each step. This interpretation has many algebraic and combinatorial properties, with connections to Stirling numbers, Dyck…
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…
We consider new types of perfect shuffles wherein a deck is split in half, one half of the deck is "reversed", and then the cards are interlaced. Flip shuffles are when the reversal comes from flipping the half over so that we also need to…
We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…
The game of SET is one of the best mathematical games ever. It is no wonder that people have tried to generalize it. We discuss existing generalizations of the game of SET to different groups. We concentrate on two types of generalization:…
We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
In two-player games on graph, the players construct an infinite path through the game graph and get a reward computed by a payoff function over infinite paths. Over weighted graphs, the typical and most studied payoff functions compute the…
We define the Sign Game as a two-player game played on a simple undirected mathematical graph $G$. The players alternate turns, assigning vertices of $G$ either $1$ or $-1$, and edges take on the value of the product of their endvertices.…
This paper investigates repeated win-lose coordination games (WLC-games). We analyse which protocols are optimal for these games, covering both the worst case and average case scenarios, i,e., optimizing the guaranteed and expected…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
Consider a well-shuffled deck of cards of $n$ different types where each type occurs $m$ times. In a complete feedback game, a player is asked to guess the top card from the deck. After each guess, the top card is revealed to the player and…
We introduce a two-player model of reinforcement learning with memory. Past actions of an iterated game are stored in a memory and used to determine player's next action. To examine the behaviour of the model some approximate methods are…
Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…
This paper studies a single-suit version of the card game War on a finite deck of cards. There are varying methods of how players put the cards that they win back into their hands, but we primarily consider randomly putting the cards back…
We consider concurrent mean-payoff games, a very well-studied class of two-player (player 1 vs player 2) zero-sum games on finite-state graphs where every transition is assigned a reward between 0 and 1, and the payoff function is the…