Related papers: Simulating a die roll by flipping two coins
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
We study first passage statistics of the Polya urn model. In this random process, the urn contains two types of balls. In each step, one ball is drawn randomly from the urn, and subsequently placed back into the urn together with an…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…
The semi-random graph process is a single player game in which the player is initially presented an empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a vertex $u$ is presented to the player independently and uniformly at random. The player then…
This article traces a brief history of the use of single electron spins to compute. In classical computing schemes, a binary bit is represented by the spin polarization of a single electron confined in a quantum dot. If a weak magnetic…
Consider a permutation $\sigma\in S_n$ as a deck of cards numbered from 1 to $n$ and laid out in a row, where $\sigma_j$ denotes the number of the card that is in the $j$-th position from the left.\rm\ We define two cyclic to random…
Simultaneous diagonal flips in plane triangulations are investigated. It is proved that every $n$-vertex triangulation with at least six vertices has a simultaneous flip into a 4-connected triangulation, and that it can be computed in O(n)…
In a recent article in American Scientist, Theodore Hill described a coin-tossing game whose pay-off is the number of heads over the total number of throws. Suppose that at a given point during the game you have 5 heads and 3 tails, should…
A two-party coin-flipping protocol is $\epsilon$-fair if no efficient adversary can bias the output of the honest party (who always outputs a bit, even if the other party aborts) by more than $\epsilon$. Cleve [STOC '86] showed that…
This paper is inspired by the PQ penny flip game. It employs group-theoretic concepts to study the original game and also its possible extensions. We show that the PQ penny flip game can be associated with the dihedral group $D_{8}$. We…
A casino offers the following game. There are three cups each containing a die. You are being told that the dice in the cups are all the same, but possibly nonstandard. For a bet of \$1, the game master shakes all three cups and lets you…
To an adult, it's obvious that the day of someone's death is not precisely determined by the day of birth, but it's a very different story for a child. When the third named author was four years old he asked his father, the fifth named…
How can two parties with competing interests carry out a fair coin flip, using only a noiseless quantum channel? This problem (quantum weak coin-flipping) was formalized more than 15 years ago, and, despite some phenomenal theoretical…
Random selection, leader election, and collective coin flipping are fundamental tasks in fault-tolerant distributed computing. We study these problems in the full-information model where despite decades of study, key gaps remain in our…
Suppose a coin with unknown probability $p$ of heads can be flipped as often as desired. A Bernoulli factory for a function $f$ is an algorithm that uses flips of the coin together with auxiliary randomness to flip a single coin with…
A deck of $n$ cards are shuffled by repeatedly taking off the top card, flipping it with probability $1/2$, and inserting it back into the deck at a random position. This process can be considered as a Markov chain on the group $B_n$ of…
We study the motion of skateboard flip tricks by modeling them as continuous curves in the group $SO(3)$ of special orthogonal matrices. We show that up to continuous deformation there are only four flip tricks. The proof relies on an…
In this note we study how to share a good between n players in a simple and equitable way. We give a short proof for the existence of such fair divisions.
The ``overlapping-cycles shuffle'' mixes a deck of $n$ cards by moving either the $n$th card or the $(n-k)$th card to the top of the deck, with probability half each. We determine the spectral gap for the location of a single card, which,…
In the game "Super Six", after successfully getting rid of a stick by rolling with the die a number that is not occupied, the player has the choice to continue to roll the die or to stop and to hand over the die to their opponent. The…