Related papers: The (Final) countdown
The deduction game is a variation of the game of cops and robber on graphs in which searchers must capture an invisible evader in at most one move. Searchers know each others' initial locations, but can only communicate if they are on the…
The Football World Cup as world's favorite sporting event is a source of both entertainment and overwhelming amount of data about the games played. In this paper we analyse the available data on football world championships since 1930 until…
The challenge of programming classical computers to play traditional, competitive games against human players has helped to advance classical hardware and software. Quantum computers have the potential to play games in a unique way:…
Before atomic timekeeping, clocks were set to the skies. But starting in 1972, radio signals began broadcasting atomic seconds and leap seconds have occasionally been added to that stream of atomic seconds to keep the signals synchronized…
This brief paper describes the single-player card game called "Perpetual Motion" and reports on a computational analysis of the game's outcome. The analysis follows a Monte Carlo methodology based on a sample of 10,000 randomly generated…
In 1837, the first computer program in history was sketched by the renowned mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. It was a program for the Analytical Engine. The program consists of a sequence of arithmetical operations and the…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
Storing a counter incremented $N$ times would naively consume $O(\log N)$ bits of memory. In 1978 Morris described the very first streaming algorithm: the "Morris Counter". His algorithm's space bound is a random variable, and it has been…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
We review both theoretical and experimental developments in the area of quantum games since the inception of the subject circa 1999. We will also offer a narrative on the controversy that surrounded the subject in its early days, and how…
From the 1970s up to now, Mastermind, a classic two-player game, has attracted plenty of attention, not only from the public as a popular game, but also from the academic community as a scientific issue. Mastermind with n positions and k…
Theoreticians have studied distributed algorithms in the radio network model for close to three decades. A significant fraction of this work focuses on lower bounds for basic communication problems such as wake-up (symmetry breaking among…
We are investigating who has the winning strategy in a game in which two players take turns drawing arrows trying to complete cycle cells in a graph. A cycle cell is a cycle with no chords. We examine game boards where the winning strategy…
Taskmaster is a British television show that combines comedic performance with a formal scoring system. Despite the appearance of structured competition, it remains unclear whether scoring dynamics contribute meaningfully to audience…
We study the computational complexity of a perfect-information two-player game proposed by Aigner and Fromme. The game takes place on an undirected graph where n simultaneously moving cops attempt to capture a single robber, all moving at…
Anyone who has tried to memorize a one-hundred-digit number can attest that the human brain acquires abstract information slowly. However, following a three-decade increase of results at memory competitions, the best competitors manage to…
A Subtraction-Division game is a two player combinatorial game with three parameters: a set S, a set D, and a number n. The game starts at n, and is a race to say the number 1. Each player, on their turn, can either move the total to n-s…
Poset games have been the object of mathematical study for over a century, but little has been written on the computational complexity of determining important properties of these games. In this introduction we develop the fundamentals of…
We investigate coin-flipping protocols for multiple parties in a quantum broadcast setting: (1) We propose and motivate a definition for quantum broadcast. Our model of quantum broadcast channel is new. (2) We discovered that quantum…