Related papers: The (Final) countdown
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
The game of Othello is one of the world's most complex and popular games that has yet to be computationally solved. Othello has roughly ten octodecillion (10 to the 58th power) possible game records and ten octillion (10 to the 28th power)…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
The score sequence of a tournament is the sequence of the out-degrees of its vertices arranged in nondecreasing order. The problem of counting score sequences of a tournament with $n$ vertices is more than 100 years old (MacMahon 1920). In…
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into fabrics of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it [1]. This research work is a mere effort for automated decision making during sports of…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
Here we present a combinatorial decision problem, inspired by the celebrated quiz show called the countdown, that involves the computation of a given target number T from a set of k randomly chosen integers along with a set of arithmetic…
2048 is a single player video game, played by millions mostly on mobile devices. We prove rigorously for the first time that there is an algorithm with winning probability at least 0.99969, and that there is a strategy for achieving the 256…
A preparation game is a task whereby a player sequentially sends a number of quantum states to a referee, who probes each of them and announces the measurement result. The measurement setting in each round, as well as the final score of the…
An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 in the University of Cambridge by John Conway and Michael Paterson. The game starts with p spots, and ends in at most 3p-1 moves. The first player who cannot play loses. The…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
We provide a self-contained introduction to finite extensive games with perfect information. In these games players proceed in turns having, at each stage, finitely many moves to their disposal, each play always ends, and in each play the…
Cricket is unarguably one of the most popular sports in the world. Predicting the outcome of a cricket match has become a fundamental problem as we are advancing in the field of machine learning. Multiple researchers have tried to predict…
Games potentially provide a wealth of knowledge about our shared cultural past and the development of human civilisation, but our understanding of early games is incomplete and often based on unreliable reconstructions. This paper describes…
We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of…
Speedrunning is a competition that emerged from communities of early video games such as Doom (1993). Speedrunners try to finish a game in minimal time. Provably verifying the authenticity of submitted speedruns is an open problem.…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
Twenty questions is a widely popular verbal game. In recent years, many computerized versions of this game have been developed in which a user thinks of an entity and a computer attempts to guess this entity by asking a series of…