Related papers: The (Final) countdown
The gaming industry is rapidly expanding. With over 2.7 billion players worldwide, game development has become increasingly challenging. To meet the ever-changing demands and expectations of players and due to unforeseen hindrances in the…
Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating…
The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the full-stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football leagues were suddenly stopped and each country was hesitating between a relaunch of the…
We give an algorithm for solving stochastic parity games with almost-sure winning conditions on lossy channel systems, for the case where the players are restricted to finite-memory strategies. First, we describe a general framework, where…
In the last round of the FIFA World Cup group stage, games for which the outcome does not affect the selection of the qualified teams are played with little enthusiasm. Furthermore, a team that has already qualified may take into account…
We review the quantum version of a well known problem of cryptography called coin tossing (``flipping a coin via telephone''). It can be regarded as a game where two remote players (who distrust each other) tries to generate a uniformly…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…
Cricket betting is a multi-billion dollar market. Therefore, there is a strong incentive for models that can predict the outcomes of games and beat the odds provided by bookers. The aim of this study was to investigate to what degree it is…
Classification of matches played in the last rounds of sports competitions is a well-established tool for evaluating tournament designs. Both deterministic and probabilistic approaches are available for this purpose. Our paper offers the…
In a delightful article that recently appeared in Mathematics Magazine, David and Lori Mccune analyze the board game "Count Your Chickens!", recommended to children three and up. Alas, they use the advanced theory of Markov chains, that…
We report the first experimental demonstration of the odd-cycle game. We entangle two ions separated by ~2 m and the players use them to win the odd-cycle game with a probability ~26 sigma above that allowed by the best classical strategy.…
The group stage of a sports tournament is often made more appealing by introducing additional constraints in the group draw that promote an attractive and balanced group composition. For example, the number of intra-regional group matches…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player zero-sum graph games with a reachability objective. The problem is to compute the winning probability as well as the optimal strategies of both players. In this paper, we compare the three…
We consider one-round games between a classical verifier and two provers who share entanglement. We show that when the constraints enforced by the verifier are `unique' constraints (i.e., permutations), the value of the game can be well…
The Chow-Robbins game is a classical still partly unsolved stopping problem introduced by Chow and Robbins in 1965. You repeatedly toss a fair coin. After each toss, you decide if you take the fraction of heads up to now as a payoff,…
The Young Physicists Tournament is an established team-oriented scientific competition between high school students from 37 countries on 5 continents. The competition consists of scientific discussions called Fights. Three or four teams…
A match played in a sports tournament can be called stakeless if at least one team is indifferent to its outcome because it already has qualified or has been eliminated. Such a game threatens fairness since teams may not exert full effort…
Dots-and-Boxes is a child's game which remains analytically unsolved. We implement and evolve artificial neural networks to play this game, evaluating them against simple heuristic players. Our networks do not evaluate or predict the final…