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The widespread popularity of Pok\'emon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pok\'emon GO that…

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Location-based games have come to the forefront of popularity in casual and mobile gaming over the past six years. However, there is no hard data on crimes that these games enable, ranging from assault to cyberstalking to grooming. Given…

In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g. correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where…

In collaborative goal-oriented settings, the participants are not only interested in achieving a successful outcome, but do also implicitly negotiate the effort they put into the interaction (by adapting to each other). In this work, we…

While traditionally a labour intensive task, the testing of game content is progressively becoming more automated. Among the many directions in which this automation is taking shape, automatic play-testing is one of the most promising…

Since its launching, Pok{\'e}mon Go has been pointed as the largest gaming phenomenon of the smartphone age. As the game requires the user to walk in the real world to see and capture Pok{\'e}mons, a new wave of crowdsourcing apps have…

We study games with incomplete information and characterize when a feasible outcome is Pareto efficient. Outcomes with excessive randomization are inefficient: generically, the total number of action profiles across states must be strictly…

We investigate hide-and-seek games on complex networks using a random walk framework. Specifically, we investigate the efficiency of various degree-biased random walk search strategies to locate items that are randomly hidden on a subset of…

The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…

Game solving is the process of finding the theoretical outcome for a game, assuming that all player choices are optimal. This paper focuses on a technique that can reduce the heuristic search space significantly for 7x7 Killall-Go. In Go…

We present efficient algorithms for computing optimal or approximately optimal strategies in a zero-sum game for which Player I has n pure strategies and Player II has an arbitrary number of pure strategies. We assume that for any given…

We consider a minimal model of persistent random searcher with short range memory. We calculate exactly for such searcher the mean first-passage time to a target in a bounded domain and find that it admits a non trivial minimum as function…

The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…

Many artificial intelligences (AIs) are randomized. One can be lucky or unlucky with the random seed; we quantify this effect and show that, maybe contrarily to intuition, this is far from being negligible. Then, we apply two different…

In many combinatorial games, one can prove that the first player wins under best play using a simple but non-constructive argument called strategy-stealing. This work is about the complexity behind these proofs: how hard is it to actually…

What should I work on first? What can wait until later? Which projects should I prioritize and which tasks are not worth my time? These are challenging questions that many people face every day. People's intuitive strategy is to prioritize…

Pok\'emon Go, a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques, received unprecedented media coverage due to claims that it allowed for greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of people out on the streets, and…

We consider games played on finite graphs, whose goal is to obtain a trace belonging to a given set of winning traces. We focus on those states from which Player 1 cannot force a win. We explore and compare several criteria for establishing…

Game solving is a similar, yet more difficult task than mastering a game. Solving a game typically means to find the game-theoretic value (outcome given optimal play), and optionally a full strategy to follow in order to achieve that…