Related papers: Sun Bin's Legacy
We consider the following one-player game called Dundee. We are given a deck consisting of s_i cards of Value i, where i=1,...,v, and an integer m\le s_1+...+s_v. There are m rounds. In each round, the player names a number between 1 and v…
The game of bridge consists of two stages: bidding and playing. While playing is proved to be relatively easy for computer programs, bidding is very challenging. During the bidding stage, each player knowing only his/her own cards needs to…
We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two…
Tic Tac Toe is amongst the most well-known games. It has already been shown that it is a biased game, giving more chances to win for the first player leaving only a draw or a loss as possibilities for the opponent, assuming both the players…
Machine learning relies on the assumption that unseen test instances of a classification problem follow the same distribution as observed training data. However, this principle can break down when machine learning is used to make important…
A tournament is an orientation of a complete graph. We say that a vertex $x$ in a tournament $\vec T$ controls another vertex $y$ if there exists a directed path of length at most two from $x$ to $y$. A vertex is called a king if it…
In addressing the challenge of exponential scaling with the number of agents we adopt a cluster-based representation to approximately solve asymmetric games of very many players. A cluster groups together agents with a similar "strategic…
A new class of multi-player competitive stochastic games in discrete-time with an affine specification of the redistribution of payoffs at exercise is proposed and examined. Our games cover as a very special case the classic two-person…
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…
This paper presents two complementary frameworks to optimize Formula 1 race strategies, jointly accounting for energy allocation, tire wear and pit stop timing. First, the race scenario is modeled using lap time maps and a dynamic tire wear…
In a multi-battle contest, each time a player competes by investing some of her budgets or resources in a component battle to collect a value if winning the battle. There are multiple battles to fight, and the budgets get consumed over…
The Traveling Tournament Problem(TTP) is a combinatorial optimization problem where we have to give a scheduling algorithm which minimizes the total distance traveled by all the participating teams of a double round-robin tournament…
The group draw of a sports tournament requires assigning teams to groups of (almost) the same size. The most important criteria for a draw procedure are balance, randomness, and transparency, which could not be satisfied simultaneously if…
The Levine hat game requires $n$ players, each wearing an infinite random stack of black and white hats, to guess the location of a black hat on their own head seeing only the hats worn by all the other players. They are allowed a strategy…
We consider a random knockout tournament among players $1, \ldots, n$, in which each match involves two players. The match format is specified by the number of matches played in each round, where the constitution of the matches in a round…
We study two-player games with alternating moves played on infinite trees. Our main focus is on the case where the trees are full (regular) and the winning set is open (with respect to the product topology on the tree). Gale and Stewart…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
Inspired by the increasing popularity of Swiss-system tournaments in sports, we study the problem of predetermining the number of rounds that can be guaranteed in a Swiss-system tournament. Matches of these tournaments are usually…
For gambling on horses, a one-parameter family of utility functions is proposed, which contains Kelly's logarithmic criterion and the expected-return criterion as special cases. The strategies that maximize the utility function are derived,…