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Related papers: Robust Draws in Balanced Knockout Tournaments

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We consider the problem of inferring an unknown ranking of $n$ items from a random tournament on $n$ vertices whose edge directions are correlated with the ranking. We establish, in terms of the strength of these correlations, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-07-24 Dmitriy Kunisky , Daniel A. Spielman , Xifan Yu

Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2016-03-15 Vanessa Volz , Günter Rudolph , Boris Naujoks

In this paper, we consider the chance constrained based uncertain portfolio optimization problem in which the uncertain parameters are stochastic in nature. The primary goal of the work is to formulate the uncertain problem into a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-09 Pulak Swain , Akshay Kumar Ojha

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-01-09 Seung Ki Baek , Il Gu Yi , Hye Jin Park , Beom Jun Kim

Neural networks are becoming increasingly prevalent in software, and it is therefore important to be able to verify their behavior. Because verifying the correctness of neural networks is extremely challenging, it is common to focus on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Ravi Mangal , Aditya V. Nori , Alessandro Orso

In many game-theoretic settings, agents are challenged with taking decisions against the uncertain behavior exhibited by others. Often, this uncertainty arises from multiple sources, e.g., incomplete information, limited computation,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Nicolas Lanzetti , Sylvain Fricker , Saverio Bolognani , Florian Dörfler , Dario Paccagnan

According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…

In classic Kelly gambling, bets are chosen to maximize the expected log growth of wealth, under a known probability distribution. Breiman provides rigorous mathematical proofs that Kelly strategy maximizes the rate of asset growth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-11 Qingyun Sun , Stephen Boyd

We present a novel $Q$-learning algorithm tailored to solve distributionally robust Markov decision problems where the corresponding ambiguity set of transition probabilities for the underlying Markov decision process is a Wasserstein ball…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Ariel Neufeld , Julian Sester

Chance constrained program is computationally intractable due to the existence of chance constraints, which are randomly disturbed and should be satisfied with a probability. This paper proposes a two-layer randomized algorithm to address…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-11 Xun Shen , Jiancang Zhuang , Xingguo Zhang

We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-04-02 E. Ben-Naim , N. W. Hengartner , S. Redner , F. Vazquez

Robustness of linear systems with constant coefficients is considered. There exist methods and tools for analyzing the stability of systems with random or deterministic uncertainties. At the same time, there are no approaches for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-08 Andrey Tremba

We revisit the well-studied problem of designing fair and manipulation-resistant tournament rules. In this problem, we seek a mechanism that (probabilistically) identifies the winner of a tournament after observing round-robin play among…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-08 David Pennock , Daniel Schoepflin , Kangning Wang

Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Zhihuan Huang , Yuqing Kong , Tracy Xiao Liu , Grant Schoenebeck , Shengwei Xu

Inspired by applications in sports where the skill of players or teams competing against each other varies over time, we propose a probabilistic model of pairwise-comparison outcomes that can capture a wide range of time dynamics. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-20 Lucas Maystre , Victor Kristof , Matthias Grossglauser

We introduce the quadratic balanced optimization problem (QBOP) which can be used to model equitable distribution of resources with pairwise interaction. QBOP is strongly NP-hard even if the family of feasible solutions has a very simple…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-08-15 Abraham P. Punnen , Sara Taghipour , Daniel Karapetyan , Bishnu Bhattacharyya

In this paper a class of optimization problems with uncertain linear constraints is discussed. It is assumed that the constraint coefficients are random vectors whose probability distributions are only partially known. Possibility theory is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-30 Romain Guillaume , Adam Kasperski , Pawel Zielinski

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-24 Brandon Da Silva

Many real optimisation problems lead to multimodal domains and so require the identification of multiple optima. Niching methods have been developed to maintain the population diversity, to investigate many peaks in parallel and to reduce…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-05-04 Edgar Covantes Osuna , Dirk Sudholt

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Zhi Chen , Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell