Related papers: Spot it(R) Solitaire
Consider an n by n array of cards shuffled in the following manner. An element x of the array is chosen uniformly at random; Then with probability 1/2 the rectangle of cards above and to the left of x is rotated 180 degrees, and with…
Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 by Michael Paterson and John Conway. The game starts with p spots drawn on a sheet of paper, and lasts at most 3p-1 moves: the player who makes the last move wins. Sprouts is a very…
Solitaire {\sc Flood-it}, or {\sc Honey-Bee}, is a game played on a colored graph. The player resides in a source vertex. Originally his territory is the maximal connected, monochromatic subgraph that contains the source. A move consists of…
In this article we consider the action of affine group and time rescaling on planar quadratic differential systems. We construct a system of representatives of the orbits of systems with at least five invariant lines, including the line at…
We consider the problem of finding the minimal number of points required to intersect all lines in an affine space over the finite field of order 3. We also consider the problem of finding the minimal number of points required to intersect…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
We provide an explicit geometric algorithm involving only ruler and compass constructions in order to specify the specular reflection point on the surface of a reflecting sphere of radius $r$ given two focal points $A$ and $B$ lying outside…
Game solving is the process of finding the theoretical outcome for a game, assuming that all player choices are optimal. This paper focuses on a technique that can reduce the heuristic search space significantly for 7x7 Killall-Go. In Go…
We investigate the combinatorial game Slime Trail.This game is played on a graph with a starting piece in a node. Each player's objective is to reach one of their own goal nodes. Every turn the current player moves the piece and deletes the…
We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and…
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…
We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…
In this paper we study a cooperative card game called Hanabi from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. In Hanabi, each card has one among $c$ colors and a number between $1$ and $n$. The aim is to make, for each color, a…
This paper presents an iterative scheme that converges to the solution of a pseudo-monotone variational inequality problem in the setting of $\mathbb{R}^{n}$. Traditional methods often require projections onto the feasible set…
We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…
We introduce a greedy algorithm optimizing arrangements of lines with respect to a property. We apply this algorithm to the case of simpliciality: it recovers all known simplicial arrangements of lines in a very short time and also produces…
Gimbert and Horn gave an algorithm for solving simple stochastic games with running time O(r! n) where n is the number of positions of the simple stochastic game and r is the number of its coin toss positions. Chatterjee et al. pointed out…
We propose a generalization of positional games, supplementing them with a restriction on the order in which the elements of the board are allowed to be claimed. We introduce poset positional games, which are positional games with an…
Consider a randomly shuffled deck of $2n$ cards with $n$ red cards and $n$ black cards. We study the average number of moves it takes to go from a randomly shuffled deck to a deck that alternates in color by performing the following move:…
Recently, the authors of the present work (together with M. N. Kolountzakis) introduced a new version of the non-commutative Delsarte scheme and applied it to the problem of mutually unbiased bases. Here we use this method to investigate…