Related papers: Ten times eighteen
An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…
Infinitely repeated games can support cooperative outcomes that are not equilibria in the one-shot game. The idea is to make sure that any gains from deviating will be offset by retaliation in future rounds. However, this model of…
We construct a statistical ensemble of games, where in each independent subensemble we have two players playing the same game. We derive the mean payoffs per move of the representative players of the game, and we evaluate all the…
We study the problem of optimal games for the solo and coop modes of the board game Room 25 (season 1). We show that the game cannot be won in a single turn for any starting configuration, but that it can be done in two for some…
We investigate zero-sum turn-based two-player stochastic games in which the objective of one player is to maximize the amount of rewards obtained during a play, while the other aims at minimizing it. We focus on games in which the minimizer…
An algorithm based on backward induction is devised in order to compute the optimal sequence of games to be played in Parrondo games. The algorithm can be used to find the optimal sequence for any finite number of turns or in the steady…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
The AlphaZero algorithm for the learning of strategy games via self-play, which has produced superhuman ability in the games of Go, chess, and shogi, uses a quantitative reward function for game outcomes, requiring the users of the…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
A long-standing open problem in algorithmic game theory asks whether or not there is a polynomial time algorithm to compute a Nash equilibrium in a random bimatrix game. We study random win-lose games, where the entries of the $n\times n$…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and…
This study presents a rigorous mathematical approach to the optimization of round and betting policies in Blackjack, using Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and Expected Utility Theory. The analysis considers a direct confrontation between a…
This work contains the mathematical exploration of a few prototypical games in which central concepts from statistics and probability theory naturally emerge. The first two kinds of games are termed Fisher and Bayesian games, which are…
This paper considers repeated games in which one player has more information about the game than the other players. In particular, we investigate repeated two-player zero-sum games where only the column player knows the payoff matrix A of…
In this paper we describe an approach to resolve strategic games in which players can assume different types along the game. Our goal is to infer which type the opponent is adopting at each moment so that we can increase the player's odds.…
Balls-and-bins games have been a wildly successful tool for modeling load balancing problems. In this paper, we study a new scenario, which we call the ball recycling game, defined as follows: Throw m balls into n bins i.i.d. according to a…
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:…
In this paper, we study the distribution of the number of internal equilibria of a multi-player two-strategy random evolutionary game. Using techniques from the random polynomial theory, we obtain a closed formula for the probability that…
Recently, Press and Dyson have proposed a new class of probabilistic and conditional strategies for the two-player iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, so-called zero-determinant strategies. A player adopting zero-determinant strategies is able to…