Related papers: How Many Rounds Should You Expect in Urn Solitaire…
We consider various probabilistic games with piles for one player or two players. In each round of the game, a player randomly chooses to add $a$ or $b$ chips to his pile under the condition that $a$ and $b$ are not necessarily positive. If…
This paper introduces and analyzes a particular class of Polya urns: balls are of two colors, can only be added (the urns are said to be additive) and at every step the same constant number of balls is added, thus only the color…
The Plurality problem - introduced by Aigner \cite{A2004} - has many variants. In this article we deal with the following version: suppose we are given $n$ balls, each of them colored by one of three colors. A \textit{plurality ball} is one…
A cyclic urn is an urn model for balls of types $0,\ldots,m-1$. The urn starts at time zero with an initial configuration. Then, in each time step, first a ball is drawn from the urn uniformly and independently from the past. If its type is…
We consider multicolor urn models with multiple drawings. An urn model is called linear if the conditional expected value of the urn composition at time $n$ is a linear function of the composition at time $n-1$. For four different sampling…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
We consider one-round games between a classical verifier and two provers who share entanglement. We show that when the constraints enforced by the verifier are `unique' constraints (i.e., permutations), the value of the game can be well…
We study the two-player coupon-collector competition in which two independent collectors draw one coupon each per round from a set of $d$ equally likely coupon types. Myers and Wilf gave finite formulae for several two-player events and…
Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…
Consider the multicolored urn model where, after every draw, balls of the different colors are added to the urn in a proportion determined by a given stochastic replacement matrix. We consider some special replacement matrices which are not…
Consider $2k-1$ voters, each of which has a preference ranking between $n$ given alternatives. An alternative $A$ is called a Condorcet winner, if it wins against every other alternative $B$ in majority voting (meaning that for every other…
We introduce a guessing game, permutation Wordle, in which a guesser attempts to recover a hidden permutation in $S_n$. In each round, the guesser guesses a permutation (using information from previous rounds) and is told which entries of…
This paper considers a two-color, single-draw urn model with two types of balls, denoted type $1$ and type $2$, with initial counts $Y^1_0\in N^+$ and $Y^2_0\in N^+$, respectively. At each discrete time step, a ball is drawn uniformly at…
Consider a P\'olya urn with balls of several colours, where balls are drawn sequentially and each drawn ball immediately is replaced together with a fixed number of balls of the same colour. It is well-known that the proportions of balls of…
An urn contains a known number of balls of two different colors. We describe the random variable counting the smallest number of draws needed in order to observe at least $\,c\,$ of both colors when sampling without replacement for a…
The prediction of the final state probabilities of a general cuboid randomly thrown onto a surface is a problem that naturally arises in the minds of men and women familiar with regular cubic dice and the basic concepts of probability.…
We consider a generalization of the Bernoulli-Laplace model in which there are two urns and $n$ total balls, of which $r$ are red and $n - r$ white, and where the left urn holds $m$ balls. At each time increment, $k$ balls are chosen…
We introduce a fun problem that can be considered as a variant of the classic birthday problem, the Bottleneck Birthday Problem (BBP). It is stated as: what is the maximum number of people we have to choose so that no day of the year has…
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…
We study several exactly solvable Polya-Eggenberger urn models with a \emph{diminishing} character, namely, balls of a specified color, say $x$ are completely drawn after a finite number of draws. The main quantity of interest here is the…