Related papers: Twenty (simple) questions
We study the amount of entropy players asymptotically need to play a repeated normal-form game in a Nash equilibrium. Hub\'a\v{c}ek, Naor, and Ullman (SAGT'15, TCSys'16) gave sufficient conditions on a game for the minimal amount of…
Consider the set of source distributions within a fixed maximum relative entropy with respect to a given nominal distribution. Lossless source coding over this relative entropy ball can be approached in more than one way. A problem…
A two-player one-round binary game consists of two cooperative players who each replies by one bit to a message that he receives privately; they win the game if both questions and answers satisfy some predetermined property. A game is…
We study a guessing game where Alice holds a discrete random variable $X$, and Bob tries to sequentially guess its value. Before the game begins, Bob can obtain side-information about $X$ by asking an oracle, Carole, any binary question of…
Alice holds an random variable $X$, and Bob is trying to guess its value by asking questions of the form "is $X=x$?". Alice answers truthfully and the game terminates once Bob guesses correctly. Before the game begins, Bob is allowed to…
Quantum entanglement is known to provide a strong advantage in many two-party distributed tasks. We investigate the question of how much entanglement is needed to reach optimal performance. For the first time we show that there exists a…
It was recently shown that estimating the Shannon entropy $H({\rm p})$ of a discrete $k$-symbol distribution ${\rm p}$ requires $\Theta(k/\log k)$ samples, a number that grows near-linearly in the support size. In many applications $H({\rm…
Recent superhuman results in games have largely been achieved in a variety of zero-sum settings, such as Go and Poker, in which agents need to compete against others. However, just like humans, real-world AI systems have to coordinate and…
In 2024, Daniel Litt posed a simple coinflip game pitting Alice's "Heads-Heads" vs Bob's "Heads-Tails": who is more likely to win if they score 1 point per occurrence of their substring in a sequence of n fair coinflips? This attracted over…
We present a formalism that captures the process of proving quantum superiority to skeptics as an interactive game between two agents, supervised by a referee. Bob, is sampling from a classical distribution on a quantum device that is…
The histogram is a key method for visualizing data and estimating the underlying probability distribution. Incorrect conclusions about the data result from over or under-binning. A new method based on the Shannon entropy of the histogram…
We show an essentially tight bound on the number of adaptively chosen statistical queries that a computationally efficient algorithm can answer accurately given $n$ samples from an unknown distribution. A statistical query asks for the…
In a two-player game, two cooperating but non communicating players, Alice and Bob, receive inputs taken from a probability distribution. Each of them produces an output and they win the game if they satisfy some predicate on their…
The recently released AlphaZero algorithm achieves superhuman performance in the games of chess, shogi and Go, which raises two open questions. Firstly, as there is a finite number of possibilities in the game, is there a quantifiable…
Let $P = \{p(i)\}$ be a measure of strictly positive probabilities on the set of nonnegative integers. Although the countable number of inputs prevents usage of the Huffman algorithm, there are nontrivial $P$ for which known methods find a…
In this article we provide initial findings regarding the problem of solving likelihood equations by means of a maximum entropy approach. Unlike standard procedures that require equating at zero the score function of the maximum-likelihood…
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…
This paper considers the estimation of Shannon entropy for discrete distributions with countably infinite support. While minimax rates for finite-support distributions are established, infinite-support distributions present distinct…
In this paper, we consider the problem of guessing a sequence subject to a distortion constraint. Specifically, we assume the following game between Alice and Bob: Alice has a sequence $\bx$ of length $n$. Bob wishes to guess $\bx$, yet he…
In "Recognizing the Maximum of a Sequence", Gilbert and Mosteller analyze a full information game where n measurements from an uniform distribution are drawn and a player (knowing n) must decide at each draw whether or not to choose that…