Related papers: A Treatise on Sucker's Bets

A generalized $N$-sided die is a random variable $D$ on a sample space of $N$ equally likely outcomes taking values in the set of positive integers. We say of independent $N$ sided dice $D_i, D_j$ that $D_i$ beats $D_j$, written $D_i \to…

In the spirit of "multi-culturalism", we use four kinds of computations: simulation, numeric, symbolic, and "conceptual" to explore some "games of pure chance" inspired by children board games like "Snakes and Ladders" (aka as "Chutes and…

In 1904, Dickson [5] stated a very important conjecture. Now people call it Dickson's conjecture. In 1958, Schinzel and Sierpinski [14] generalized Dickson's conjecture to the higher order integral polynomial case. However, they did not…

Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…

We consider a game in which a blindfolded player attempts to set $n$ counters lying on the vertices of a rotating regular $n$-gon table simultaneously to $0$. When the counters count$\pmod{m}$ we simplify the argument of Bar Yehuda, Etzion,…

Chess and chance are seemingly strange bedfellows. Luck and/or randomness have no apparent role in move selection when the game is played at the highest levels. However, when competition is at the ultimate level, that of the World Chess…

A large class of Positional Games are defined on the complete graph on $n$ vertices. The players, Maker and Breaker, take the edges of the graph in turns, and Maker wins iff his subgraph has a given -- usually monotone -- property. Here we…

We use mathematical statistics theory to derive the Compound-Dirichlet-Multinomial (CDM) prediction model. We then use this model to predict winning numbers for the 6-number, 5-number, pick-4 and pick-3 lottery games. We also develop a…

In 1966, Alan Sutcliffe published an introductory paper on "numbers which are multiplied when their digits are reversed". Two years later T. J. Kaczynski extended Sutcliffe's work to show that there exists a 3 digit number in base n with…

A certain sampling process, concerning an urn with balls of two colors, proposed in 1965 by B.E. Oakley and R.L. Perry, and discussed by Peter Winkler and Martin Gardner, that has an extremely simple answer for the probability, namely the…

In 1934 L. R\'edei published his famous theorem that the number of Hamiltonian paths in a tournament is odd. In fact it is a corollary of a stronger theorem in his paper. Stronger theorems were also obtained in the early 1970s by G.A. Dirac…

In this paper, we make significant progress on a conjecture proposed by Dan Archdeacon on the existence of integer Heffter arrays $H(m,n;s,k)$ whenever the necessary conditions hold, that is, $3\leqslant s \leqslant n$, $3\leqslant…

Zipf's law is well known in linguistics: the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. This is a special case of a more general power law, a common phenomenon in many kinds of real-world statistical data. Here, it is shown…

Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is…

The famous Descartes' rule of signs from 1637 giving an upper bound on the number of positive roots of a real univariate polynomials in terms of the number of sign changes of its coefficients, has been an indispensable source of inspiration…

Consider three players Alice, Bob and Cath who hold a, b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of d=a+b+c cards. The cards are all different and players only know their own cards. Suppose Alice and Bob wish to communicate their cards to…

In a strong game played on the edge set of a graph G there are two players, Red and Blue, alternating turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of G (with Red playing first). The winner is the first one to claim all the edges of some…

The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…

We revisit the classic 'guess my number' game and extend it from its familiar binary form to representations in any integer base. For each base we derive formulas for the number of cards needed to identify a given integer and, conversely,…

Consider an n by n array of cards shuffled in the following manner. An element x of the array is chosen uniformly at random; Then with probability 1/2 the rectangle of cards above and to the left of x is rotated 180 degrees, and with…