Related papers: Testing Randomness by Matching Pennies
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
We study a game puzzle that has enjoyed recent popularity among mathematicians, computer scientist, coding theorists and even the mass press. In the game, $n$ players are fitted with randomly assigned colored hats. Individual players can…
What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given \$25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61…
Randomized mechanisms can have good normative properties compared to their deterministic counterparts. However, randomized mechanisms are problematic in several ways such as in their verifiability. We propose here to derandomize such…
Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…
This paper coins the notion of Joker games, a variant of concurrent games where the players are not strictly adversarial. Instead, Player 1 can get help from Player 2 by playing a Joker move. We formalize these games as cost games and…
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…
What is the average number of tosses needed before a particular sequence of heads and tails turns up? We solve the problem didactically, starting with doubles, finding that a tail, followed by a head, turns up on the average after only four…
We study the following combinatorial game played by two players, Alice and Bob, which generalizes the Pizza game considered by Brown, Winkler and others. Given a connected graph G with nonnegative weights assigned to its vertices, the…
In two-player finite-state stochastic games of partial observation on graphs, in every state of the graph, the players simultaneously choose an action, and their joint actions determine a probability distribution over the successor states.…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit model captures the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the effects of competition and cooperation on this tradeoff. Suppose there are $k$ arms and two players, Alice and Bob. In every…
We consider the following two-player game on a graph. A token is located at a vertex, and the players take turns to move it along an edge to a vertex that has not been visited before. A player who cannot move loses. We analyze outcomes with…
In coin tossing two remote participants want to share a uniformly distributed random bit. At the least in the quantum version, each participant test whether or not the other has attempted to create a bias on this bit. It is requested that,…
We consider game theory from the perspective of quantum algorithms. Strategies in classical game theory are either pure (deterministic) or mixed (probabilistic). We introduce these basic ideas in the context of a simple example, closely…
A quantum board game is a multi-round protocol between a single quantum player against the quantum board. Molina and Watrous discovered quantum hedging. They gave an example for perfect quantum hedging: a board game with winning probability…
In the compulsive gambler process there is a finite set of agents who meet pairwise at random times ($i$ and $j$ meet at times of a rate-$\nu_{ij}$ Poisson process) and, upon meeting, play an instantaneous fair game in which one wins the…
Evolutionary game theory is a common framework to study the evolution of cooperation, where it is usually assumed that the same game is played in all interactions. Here, we investigate a model where the game that is played by two…
We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…
A decision maker observes the evolving state of the world while constantly trying to predict the next state given the history of past states. The ability to benefit from such predictions depends not only on the ability to recognize patters…
We propose a new model of provenance, based on a game-theoretic approach to query evaluation. First, we study games G in their own right, and ask how to explain that a position x in G is won, lost, or drawn. The resulting notion of game…