Related papers: Reducing Guesswork via an Unreliable Oracle
We show how two distrustful parties, "Bob" and "Charlie", can share a secret key with the help of a mutually trusted "Alice", counterfactually - that is with no information-carrying particles travelling between any of the three parties.
String commitment schemes are similar to the well studied bit commitment schemes in cryptography with the difference that the committing party, say Alice, is supposed to commit a long string instead of a single bit, to another party say…
A gambler walks into a hypothetical fair casino with a very real dollar bill, but by the time he leaves he's exchanged the dollar for a random amount of money. What is lost in the process? It may be that the gambler walks out at the end of…
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…
Alice seeks an information-theoretically secure source of private random data. Unfortunately, she lacks a personal source and must use remote sources controlled by other parties. Alice wants to simulate a coin flip of specified bias…
We study the probability of making an error if, by querying an oracle a fixed number of times, we declare constant a randomly chosen n-bit Boolean function. We compare the classical and the quantum case, and we determine for how many…
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…
We study problems with stochastic uncertainty information on intervals for which the precise value can be queried by paying a cost. The goal is to devise an adaptive decision tree to find a correct solution to the problem in consideration…
If Alice must communicate with Bob over a channel shared with the adversarial Eve, then Bob must be able to validate the authenticity of the message. In particular we consider the model where Alice and Eve share a discrete memoryless…
This paper studies the complexity of query evaluation for databases whose relations are partially ordered; the problem commonly arises when combining or transforming ordered data from multiple sources. We focus on queries in a useful…
Consider a database most of whose entries are marked but the precise fraction of marked entries is not known. What is known is that the fraction of marked entries is 1-X, where X is a random variable that is uniformly distributed in the…
We describe a simple scheme that allows an agent to learn about its environment in an unsupervised manner. Our scheme pits two versions of the same agent, Alice and Bob, against one another. Alice proposes a task for Bob to complete; and…
In the gambling foundation of probability theory, rationality requires that a subject should always (never) find desirable all nonnegative (negative) gambles, because no matter the result of the experiment the subject never (always)…
Conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) is the problem of disclosing as efficiently as possible, one secret from Alice and Bob to Carol if and only if the inputs at Alice and Bob satisfy some function $f$. The information theoretic capacity…
We provide an interesting two-party parity oblivious communication game whose success probability is solely determined by the Bell expression. The parity-oblivious condition in an operational quantum theory implies the preparation…
A graceful labeling of a graph $G$ with $m$ edges consists of labeling the vertices of $G$ with distinct integers from $0$ to $m$ such that, when each edge is assigned as induced label the absolute difference of the labels of its endpoints,…
It is well known that reinforcement learning can be cast as inference in an appropriate probabilistic model. However, this commonly involves introducing a distribution over agent trajectories with probabilities proportional to exponentiated…
We study conditioning on null events, or surprises, and behaviorally characterize the Ordered Surprises (OS) representation of beliefs. For feasible events, our Decision Maker (DM) is Bayesian. For null events, our DM considers a hierarchy…
We study an evolutionary game of chance in which the probabilities for different outcomes (e.g., heads or tails) depend on the amount wagered on those outcomes. The game is perhaps the simplest possible probabilistic game in which…
Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. A gambler is sent values in an online fashion, sampled from an instance of independent distributions, in an adversarial, random or selected order, depending on…