Related papers: The (Final) countdown
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
Given a finite sequence of events and a well-defined notion of events being interesting, the Odds-theorem (Bruss (2000)) gives an online strategy to stop on the last interesting event. It is optimal for independent events. Here we study…
The Decodoku project seeks to let users get hands-on with cutting-edge quantum research through a set of simple puzzle games. The design of these games is explicitly based on the problem of decoding qudit variants of surface codes. This…
Data streaming, in which a large dataset is received as a "stream" of updates, is an important model in the study of space-bounded computation. Starting with the work of Le Gall [SPAA `06], it has been known that quantum streaming…
This work is concerned with the rating of players/teams in face-to-face games with three possible outcomes: loss, win, and draw. This is one of the fundamental problems in sport analytics, where the very simple and popular, non-trivial…
In 1979, David Fabian found a complete game of two-person Chinese Checkers in 30 moves (15 by each player) [Martin Gardner, Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers, MAA, 1997]. This solution requires that the two players cooperate to generate a…
In a recent work on quantum state preparation, S{\o}rensen and colleagues explore the possibility of using video games to help design quantum control protocols. The authors present a game called "Quantum Moves" in which gamers have to move…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
The data broadcast problem is to find a schedule for broadcasting a given set of messages over multiple channels. The goal is to minimize the cost of the broadcast plus the expected response time to clients who periodically and…
Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics evince…
On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly…
In 2022, Olivier Longuet, a French mathematics teacher, created a game called the \textit{calissons puzzle}. Given a triangular grid in a hexagon and some given edges of the grid, the problem is to find a calisson tiling such that no input…
In a guessing game, players guess the value of a random real number selected using some probability density function. The winner may be determined in various ways; for example, a winner can be a player whose guess is closest in magnitude to…
We answer to criticisms of O. Keller about our interpretation work on the Ishango rod, the oldest mathematical tool of humankind. Our hypothesis, that is widely accepted, is that this prehistoric rod is the first mankind manifestation of a…
The infamous 3x+1 conjecture spread by Lothar Collatz in 1952, despite its elementary formulation, remained unproved for over 60 years. From the heuristical probabilistic approach to the complex mapping of the algorithm, the scientific…
Multi-stage tournaments consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knockout phase are ubiquitous in sports. However, this format is incentive incompatible if at least two teams from a group advance to the knockout stage where the…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
Technology has had an unquestionable impact on the way people watch sports. Along with this technological evolution has come a higher standard to ensure a good viewing experience for the casual sports fan. It can be argued that the…
In this paper we survey the computational time complexity of assorted simple stochastic game problems, and we give an overview of the best known algorithms associated with each problem.
Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…