Related papers: Optimal Strategy in "Guess Who?": Beyond Binary Se…

This paper studies two-player zero-sum stochastic Bayesian games where each player has its own dynamic state that is unknown to the other player. Using typical techniques, we provide the recursive formulas and sufficient statistics in both…

Stochastic games combine controllable and adversarial non-determinism with stochastic behavior and are a common tool in control, verification and synthesis of reactive systems facing uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic games are natural…

Consider concurrent, infinite duration, two-player win/lose games played on graphs. If the winning condition satisfies some simple requirement, the existence of Player 1 winning (finite-memory) strategies is equivalent to the existence of…

Probabilistic concurrent/distributed strategies have so far not been investigated thoroughly in the context of imperfect information, where the Player has only partial knowledge of the moves made by the Opponent. In a situation where the…

Synthesis of bulletproof strategies in imperfect information scenarios is a notoriously hard problem. In this paper, we suggest that it is sometimes a viable alternative to aim at "reasonably good" strategies instead. This makes sense not…

Fighting Fantasy is a popular recreational fantasy gaming system worldwide. Combat in this system progresses through a stochastic game involving a series of rounds, each of which may be won or lost. Each round, a limited resource (`luck')…

The ability of a deterministic, plastic system to learn to imitate stochastic behavior is analyzed. Two neural networks -actually, two perceptrons- are put to play a zero-sum game one against the other. The competition, by acting as a kind…

In a game where both contestants have perfect information, there is a strict limit on how perfect that information can be. By contrast, when one player is deprived of all information, the limit on the other player's information disappears,…

We consider turn-based stochastic two-player games with a combination of a parity condition that must hold surely, that is in all possible outcomes, and of a parity condition that must hold almost-surely, that is with probability 1. The…

We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two…

This paper presents an in-depth statistical analysis of an experiment designed to measure the extent to which players in a simple game behave according to a popular behavioral economic model. The p-beauty contest is a multi-player number…

This paper investigates the problem of determining a binary-valued function through a sequence of strategically selected queries. The focus is an algorithm called Generalized Binary Search (GBS). GBS is a well-known greedy algorithm for…

The semigroup game is a two-person zero-sum game defined on a semigroup S as follows: Players 1 and 2 choose elements x and y in S, respectively, and player 1 receives a payoff f(xy) defined by a function f from S to [-1,1]. If the…

A card guessing game is played between two players, Guesser and Dealer. At the beginning of the game, the Dealer holds a deck of $n$ cards (labeled $1, ..., n$). For $n$ turns, the Dealer draws a card from the deck, the Guesser guesses…

To verify the robustness of a program or protocol, it is common in the computer science community to rely on the theoretical framework of game theory. In particular, if one seeks to enforce a desired property, or specification, despite an…

Game theory is the mathematical framework for analyzing strategic interactions in conflict and competition situations. In recent years quantum game theory has earned the attention of physicists, and has emerged as a branch of quantum…

A Stackelberg game is played between a leader and a follower. The leader first chooses an action, then the follower plays his best response. The goal of the leader is to pick the action that will maximize his payoff given the follower's…

The game of Hangman is a classical asymmetric two player game in which one player, the setter, chooses a secret word from a language, that the other player, the guesser, tries to discover through single letter matching queries, answered by…

In increasingly different contexts, it happens that a human player has to interact with artificial players who make decisions following decision-making algorithms. How should the human player play against these algorithms to maximize his…

We consider a problem of guessing, wherein an adversary is interested in knowing the value of the realization of a discrete random variable $X$ on observing another correlated random variable $Y$. The adversary can make multiple (say, $k$)…