Related papers: A Treatise on Sucker's Bets
These notes describe some results on dice comparisons when changing the numbers on the faces while the sum of all the face stay the same.
The classic Rock-Paper-Scissors game of size 3 and its extension, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, are modeled by directed graphs called tournaments. They can be further extended to any odd size. The extended games are regular tournaments…
A new model, which uses the frequency of individuals' annual home run totals, is employed to predict future home run totals and records in Major League Baseball. Complete home run frequency data from 1903--2005 is analyzed, resulting in…
In this article, we will use elementary number theory techniques to investigate a sequence of integers defined by a sifting process called the lucky numbers. Ulam introduced lucky numbers as a sieve-based analogue of prime numbers. We…
On being told that a piece of work he thought was his discovery had duplicated an earlier mathematician's work, Larry Shepp once replied "Yes, but when {\em I} discovered it, it {\em stayed} discovered". In this spirit we give discussion…
We study a mathematical model of voting contest with $m$ voters and $n$ candidates, with each voter ranking the candidates in order of preference, without ties. A Condorcet winner is a candidate who gets more than $m/2$ votes in pairwise…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
The \textit{Collatz's conjecture} is an unsolved problem in mathematics. It is named after Lothar Collatz in 1973. The conjecture also known as Syrucuse conjecture or problem. Take any positive integer $ n $. If $ n $ is even then divide it…
The Game of Cycles is a combinatorial game introduced by Francis Su in 2020 in which players take turns marking arrows on the edges of a simple plane graph, avoiding the creation of sinks and sources and seeking to complete a "cycle cell."…
Charles L. Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll, in his book "Pillow problems" from 1893 asked for the likelihood of a random triangle to be obtuse. Clearly, the answer to Dodgson's question depends strongly on the assumed random…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
The number of ``carries'' when $n$ random integers are added forms a Markov chain [23]. We show that this Markov chain has the same transition matrix as the descent process when a deck of $n$ cards is repeatedly riffle shuffled. This gives…
The rating of items based on pairwise comparisons has been a topic of statistical investigation for many decades. Numerous approaches have been proposed. One of the best known is the Bradley-Terry model. This paper seeks to assemble and…
Description logics are a powerful tool for describing ontological knowledge bases. That is, they give a factual account of the world in terms of individuals, concepts and relations. In the presence of uncertainty, such factual accounts are…
Consider the following Maker-Breaker game. Fix a finite subset $S\subset\mathbb{N}$ of the naturals. The players Maker and Breaker take turns choosing previously unclaimed natural numbers. Maker wins by eventually building a homothetic copy…
On March 16, 2024, Daniel Litt, in an X-post, proposed the following brainteaser: "Flip a fair coin 100 times. It gives a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). For each HH in the sequence of flips, Alice gets a point; for each HT, Bob does,…
Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 in the University of Cambridge by John Conway and Michael Paterson. The game starts with p spots, and ends in at most 3p-1 moves. The first player who cannot play loses. The…
The well-know needle experiment of Buffon can be regarded as an analog (i.e., continuous) device that stochastically "computes" the number 2/pi ~ 0.63661, which is the experiment's probability of success. Generalizing the experiment and…
Maker-Breaker subgraph games are among the most famous combinatorial games. For given $n,q \in \mathbb{N}$ and a subgraph $C$ of the complete graph $K_n$, the two players, called Maker and Breaker, alternately claim edges of $K_n$. In each…
The game of SET is one of the best mathematical games ever. It is no wonder that people have tried to generalize it. We discuss existing generalizations of the game of SET to different groups. We concentrate on two types of generalization:…