Related papers: Twenty (simple) questions
We characterize the communication complexity of the following distributed estimation problem. Alice and Bob observe infinitely many iid copies of $\rho$-correlated unit-variance (Gaussian or $\pm1$ binary) random variables, with unknown…
Finding a counterfeit coin with the different weight from a set of visually identical coin using a balance, usually a two-armed balance, known as the balance question, is an intersting and inspiring question. Its variants involve…
Generating payoff matrices of normal-form games at random, we calculate the frequency of games with a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium in the ensemble of $n$-player, $m$-strategy games. These are perfectly predictable as they must…
We analyse the common information problem for the generalised Gray-Wyner problem. We aim to explore the problem and solution in relation to the non-orthogonality among the source decoders' components. We consider a simple networked control…
Quantum resources may provide advantage over their classical counterparts. Theoretically, in certain tasks, this advantage can be very high. In this work, we construct such a task based on a game, mediated by Referee and played between…
The distribution functions of the codon usage probabilities, computed over all the available GenBank data, for 40 eukaryotic biological species and 5 chloroplasts, do not follow a Zipf law, but are best fitted by the sum of a constant, an…
We study a variant of the synchronization game on finite deterministic automata. In this game, Alice chooses one input letter of an automaton $A$ on each of her moves while Bob may respond with an arbitrary finite word over the input…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
Motivated by the human-machine interaction such as training chatbots for improving customer satisfaction, we study human-guided human-machine interaction involving private information. We model this interaction as a two-player turn-based…
Huffman coding finds a prefix code that minimizes mean codeword length for a given probability distribution over a finite number of items. Campbell generalized the Huffman problem to a family of problems in which the goal is to minimize not…
Entropy is a fundamental property of both classical and quantum systems, spanning myriad theoretical and practical applications in physics and computer science. We study the problem of obtaining estimates to within a multiplicative factor…
Statistical mechanics is based on interplay between energy minimization and entropy maximization. Here we formalize this interplay via axioms of cooperative game theory (Nash bargaining) and apply it out of equilibrium. These axioms capture…
Encoding and decoding are the two key steps in information processing. In this work we study the encoding and decoding capabilities of operational theories in the context of information-storability game, where the task is to freely choose a…
We consider the following game that has been used as a way of testing claims of extrasensory perception (ESP). One is given a deck of $mn$ cards comprised of $n$ distinct types each of which appears exactly $m$ times: this deck is shuffled…
The inaccessible game (Lawrence, 2025, 2026) is an information-theoretic dynamical system governed by three information loss axioms, a marginal entropy conservation constraint and maximum entropy dynamics. In this paper we look at selection…
Poker is in the family of imperfect information games unlike other games such as chess, connect four, etc which are perfect information game instead. While many perfect information games have been solved, no non-trivial imperfect…
Best-response mechanisms (Nisan, Schapira, Valiant, Zohar, 2011) provide a unifying framework for studying various distributed protocols in which the participants are instructed to repeatedly best respond to each others' strategies. Two…
Howard's Policy Iteration (HPI) is a classic algorithm for solving Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). HPI uses a "greedy" switching rule to update from any non-optimal policy to a dominating one, iterating until an optimal policy is found.…
A long-standing open problem in algorithmic game theory asks whether or not there is a polynomial time algorithm to compute a Nash equilibrium in a random bimatrix game. We study random win-lose games, where the entries of the $n\times n$…
It is well known that to estimate the Shannon entropy for symbolic sequences accurately requires a large number of samples. When some aspects of the data are known it is plausible to attempt to use this to more efficiently compute entropy.…