Related papers: Penney's game between many players

A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…

In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…

We study the mathematical properties of probabilistic processes in which the independent actions of $n$ players (`causes') can influence the outcome of each player (`effects'). In such a setting, each pair of outcomes will generally be…

The Parrondo effect describes the seemingly paradoxical situation in which two losing games can, when combined, become winning [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 24 (2000)]. Here we generalize this analysis to the case where both games are…

We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…

Consider a rooted Galton-Watson tree $T$, to each of whose edges we assign, independently, a weight that equals $+1$ with probability $p_{1}$, $0$ with probability $p_{0}$ and $-1$ with probability $p_{-1}=1-p_{1}-p_{0}$. We play a game on…

One of the most direct human mechanisms of promoting cooperation is rewarding it. We study the effect of sharing a reward among cooperators in the most stringent form of social dilemma, namely the Prisoner's Dilemma. Specifically, for a…

Using coalgebraic methods, we extend Conway's theory of games to possibly non-terminating, i.e. non-wellfounded games (hypergames). We take the view that a play which goes on forever is a draw, and hence rather than focussing on winning…

We present some new analytical expressions for the so-called Parrondo effect, where simple coin-flipping games with negative expected value are combined into a winning game. Parrondo games are state-dependent. By identifying the game state…

We derive an explicit formula for the probability of ruin of a gambler playing against an infinitely-rich adversary, when the games have payoff given by a general integer-valued probability distribution.

We study a game where one player selects a random function, and the other has to guess that function, and show that with high probability the second player can correctly guess most of the random function. We apply this analysis to…

We characterize the initial positions from which the first player has a winning strategy in a certain two-player game. This provides a generalization of Hall's theorem. Vizing's edge coloring theorem follows from a special case.

We study games in which every action requires planning and preparation. Moreover, before players act, they can revise their plans based on partially revealing information that they receive on their adversary's preparations. In turn, we…

For a family of multidimensional gambler models we provide formulas for the winning probabilities (in terms of parameters of the system) and for the distribution of game duration (in terms of eigenvalues of underlying one-dimensional…

We present new versions of the Parrondo's paradox by which a losing game can be turned into winning by including a mechanism that allows redistribution of the capital amongst an ensemble of players. This shows that, for this particular…

In this paper, we introduce a notion of generalized potential games that is inspired by a newly developed theory on generalized gradient flows. More precisely, a game is called generalized potential if the simultaneous gradient of the loss…

That there exist two losing games that can be combined, either by random mixture or by nonrandom alternation, to form a winning game is known as Parrondo's paradox. We establish a strong law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for…

Population games model the evolution of strategic interactions among a large number of uniform agents. Due to the agents' uniformity and quantity, their aggregate strategic choices can be approximated by the solutions of a class of ordinary…

We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…

We revisit games in partition function form, i.e. cooperative games where the payoff of a coalition depends on the partition of the entire set of players. We assume that each coalition computes its worth having probabilistic beliefs over…