Related papers: How Many Rounds Should You Expect in Urn Solitaire…

The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…

We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…

In this paper we solve the three-player-game question. A three-player-game consists of a series of rounds. There are altogether three players. Two players participate in each round, at the end of the round the loser quits and the third…

In the standard formulation of the occupancy problem one considers the distribution of r balls in n cells, with each ball assigned independently to a given cell with probability 1/n. Although closed form expressions can be given for the…

We investigate the following version of the well-known R\'enyi-Ulam game. Two players - the Questioner and the Responder - play against each other. The Responder thinks of a number from the set $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, and the Questioner has to…

The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…

Let $A_1, A_2, \ldots, A_n$ be events in a sample space. Given the probability of the intersection of each collection of up to $k+1$ of these events, what can we say about the probability that at least $r$ of the events occur? This question…

We study the survival probability for long times in an open spherical billiard, extending previous work on the circular billiard. We provide details of calculations regarding two billiard configurations, specifically a sphere with a…

We consider weighted negatively reinforced urn schemes with finitely many colours. An urn scheme is called negatively reinforced, if the selection probability for a colour is proportional to the weight $w$ of the colour proportion, where…

We hypothesize that if election results are manipulated or forged, then, due to the well-known human attraction to round numbers, the frequency of reported round percentages can be increased. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed raw data…

In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…

Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…

In this paper we provide formulas for the expectation of a conditional game duration in a finite state-space one-dimensional gambler's ruin problem with arbitrary winning $p(n)$ and losing $q(n)$ probabilities (i.e., they depend on the…

P{\'o}lya urns are urns where at each unit of time a ball is drawn and is replaced with some other balls according to its colour. We introduce a more general model: The replacement rule depends on the colour of the drawn ball and the value…

Consider a generalized time-dependent P\'olya urn process defined as follows. Let $d\in \mathbb{N}$ be the number of urns/colors. At each time $n$, we distribute $\sigma_n$ balls randomly to the $d$ urns, proportionally to $f$, where $f$ is…

Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial…

One of the most popular lottery games worldwide is the so-called ``lotto k/N''. It considers N numbers 1,2,...,N from which k are drawn randomly, without replacement. A player selects k or more numbers and the first prize is shared amongst…

We show that there is a one-round randomized distributed algorithm that can 2-color cycles such that the expected fraction of monochromatic edges is less than 0.24118. We also show that a one-round algorithm cannot achieve a fraction less…

Let $G$ be a finite Abelian group of order $d$. We consider an urn in which, initially, there are labeled balls that generate the group $G$. Choosing two balls from the urn with replacement, observe their labels, and perform a group…

We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. While finding successful manipulations or agenda controls is tractable for both procedures, our…