Related papers: The (Final) countdown
The popularity of computer games is remarkably high and is still growing every year. Despite this popularity and the economical importance of gaming, research in game design, or to be more precise, of game mechanics that can be used to…
One reason that the planet Neptune will be remembered for, is to do with the fact that it was the first planet whose existence was postulated before being observed. This was based on analysing deviations in Uranus' orbit. The present study…
Information flow measures, over the duration of a game, the audience's belief of who will win, and thus can reflect the amount of surprise in a game. To quantify the relationship between information flow and audiences' perceived quality, we…
In this paper, we apply genetic algorithms to the field of electoral studies. Forecasting election results is one of the most exciting and demanding tasks in the area of market research, especially due to the fact that decisions have to be…
We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…
We study the computational complexity of distance games, a class of combinatorial games played on graphs. A move consists of colouring an uncoloured vertex subject to it not being at certain distances determined by two sets, D and S. D is…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
In less than a year's time, March 2022 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the first documented game jam, the Indie Game Jam, which took place in Oakland, California in 2002. Initially, game jams were widely seen as frivolous activities.…
Time plays a crucial role in the intuitive understanding of the world around us. Within quantum mechanics, however, time is not usually treated as an observable quantity; it enters merely as a parameter in the laws of motion of physical…
Algorithmic systems have been used to inform consequential decisions for at least a century. Recidivism prediction dates back to the 1920s. Automated credit scoring dates began in the middle of the last century, but the last decade has…
An algorithm based on backward induction is devised in order to compute the optimal sequence of games to be played in Parrondo games. The algorithm can be used to find the optimal sequence for any finite number of turns or in the steady…
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…
One of the most popular lottery games worldwide is the so-called ``lotto k/N''. It considers N numbers 1,2,...,N from which k are drawn randomly, without replacement. A player selects k or more numbers and the first prize is shared amongst…
In this paper we revisit an open problem posed by Aldous on the max-entropy win-probability martingale: given two players of equal strength, such that the win-probability is a martingale diffusion, which of these processes has maximum…
What should I work on first? What can wait until later? Which projects should I prioritize and which tasks are not worth my time? These are challenging questions that many people face every day. People's intuitive strategy is to prioritize…
Partial-monitoring games constitute a mathematical framework for sequential decision making problems with imperfect feedback: The learner repeatedly chooses an action, opponent responds with an outcome, and then the learner suffers a loss…
We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…
In the $(s,d)$-spy game over a graph, introduced by Cohen et al. in 2016, one spy and $k$ guards occupy vertices of a graph and, at each turn, each guard may move along one edge and the spy may move along at most $s$ edges. The guards win…
We conducted an experiment where participants played a perfect-information game against a computer, which was programmed to deviate often from its backward induction strategy right at the beginning of the game. Participants knew that in…
We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…