Related papers: A Treatise on Sucker's Bets
Answering a pair of questions of Conrey, Gabbard, Grant, Liu, and Morrison, we prove that a triplet of dice drawn from the multiset model are intransitive with probability $1/4+o(1)$ and the probability a random pair of dice tie tends…
The graph coloring game is a famous two-player game (re)introduced by Bodlaender in $1991$. Given a graph $G$ and $k \in \mathbb{N}$, Alice and Bob alternately (starting with Alice) color an uncolored vertex with some color in…
A Subtraction-Division game is a two player combinatorial game with three parameters: a set S, a set D, and a number n. The game starts at n, and is a race to say the number 1. Each player, on their turn, can either move the total to n-s…
In 1973 Fraenkel discovered interesting sequences which split the positive integers. These sequences became famous, because of a related unsolved conjecture. Here we construct combinatorial games, with `playable' rulesets, with these…
Consider n cards that are labeled 1 through n with n an even integer. The cards are put face down and their ordering starts with card labeled 1 on top through card labeled n at the bottom. The cards are top to random shuffled m times and…
Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target…
The 1-2-3 Conjecture, posed in 2004 by Karonski, Luczak, and Thomason, is as follows: "If G is a graph with no connected component having exactly 2 vertices, then the edges of G may be assigned weights from the set {1,2,3} so that, for any…
Positional games were introduced by Hales and Jewett in 1963, and their study became more popular after Erdos and Selfridge's first result on their connection to Ramsey theory and hypergraph coloring in 1973. Several conventions of these…
Motivated by the controversy in the chess community, where Hikaru Nakamura, a renowned grandmaster, has posted multiple impressive winning streaks over the years on the online platform chess.com, we derive the probabilities of various types…
We study triples of labeled dice in which the relation "is a better die than" is non-transitive. Focusing on such triples with an additional symmetry we call "balance," we prove that such triples of $n$-sided dice exist for all $n \geq 3$.…
Let $f(n,k)$ be the largest number of positive integers not exceeding $n$ from which one cannot select $k+1$ pairwise coprime integers, and let $E(n,k)$ be the set of positive integers which do not exceed $n$ and can be divided by at least…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
The average causal effect can often be best understood in the context of its variation. We demonstrate with two sets of four graphs, all of which represent the same average effect but with much different patterns of heterogeneity. As with…
The abc conjecture is one of the most famous unsolved problems in number theory. The conjecture claims for each real $\epsilon > 0$ that there are only a finite number of coprime positive integer solutions to the equation $a+b = c$ with $c…
For positive integers $k$ and $n$, the shuffle group $G_{k,kn}$ is generated by the $k!$ permutations of a deck of $kn$ cards performed by cutting the deck into $k$ piles with $n$ cards in each pile, and then perfectly interleaving these…
Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
We examine the complexity of the ``Texas Hold'em'' variant of poker from a topological perspective. We show that there exists a natural simplicial complex governing the multi-way winning probabilities between various hands, and that this…
With the Dodgson rule, cloning the electorate can change the winner, which Young (1977) considers an "absurdity". Removing this absurdity results in a new rule (Fishburn, 1977) for which we can compute the winner in polynomial time (Rothe…
The $abc$ conjecture states that there are only finitely many triples of coprime positive integers $(a,b,c)$ such that $a+b=c$ and $\operatorname{rad}(abc) < c^{1-\epsilon}$ for any $\epsilon > 0$. Using the optimized methods in a recent…