Related papers: The 21 Card Trick and its Generalization
Lights Out! is a game played on a $5 \times 5$ grid of lights, or more generally on a graph. Pressing lights on the grid allows the player to turn off neighboring lights. The goal of the game is to start with a given initial configuration…
Relying on the optimal guessing strategy recently found for a no-feedback card guessing game with $k$-time riffle shuffles, we derive an exact, closed-form formula for the expected number of correct guesses and higher moments for a $1$-time…
The game of Othello is one of the world's most complex and popular games that has yet to be computationally solved. Othello has roughly ten octodecillion (10 to the 58th power) possible game records and ten octillion (10 to the 28th power)…
We present an extremely simple sorting algorithm. It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct. We compare it with other simple sorting algorithms, and analyse some of its curious properties.
We introduce the idea of an n-simplex graph and games upon simplicial complexes. We then define moves on a labeled graph and pose the problem of whether given two labelings of a graph it is possible to change one into another via these…
Approval of credit card application is one of the censorious business decision the bankers are usually taking regularly. The growing number of new card applications and the enormous outstanding amount of credit card bills during the recent…
It is a crucial problem in robotics field to cage an object using robots like multifingered hand. However the problem what is the caging for general geometrical objects and robots has not been well-described in mathematics though there were…
This paper proposes \emph{knowledge-based paraonoia search} (KBPS) to find forced wins during trick-taking in the card game Skat; for some one of the most interesting card games for three players. It combines efficient partial information…
The subject of this paper is a variation of a blackjack game, mainly popular in some parts of Europe where it is known as einz (in German slang: one). We describe the rules of this game, indicate its main characteristics, give some…
A sequence of positive integers is introduced, that is proved to simultaneously solve an infinite family of related puzzles, one of which was recently featured on the popular YouTube sudoku channel \emph{Cracking the Cryptic}.
Drafting, i.e., the selection of a subset of items from a larger candidate set, is a key element of many games and related problems. It encompasses team formation in sports or e-sports, as well as deck selection in many modern card games.…
In the generalized Russian cards problem, the three players Alice, Bob and Cath draw a,b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of a+b+c cards. Players only know their own cards and what the deck of cards is. Alice and Bob are then required…
For many years, I have been collecting math jokes and posting them on my website. I have more than 400 jokes there. In this paper, which is an extended version of my talk at the G4G15, I would like to present 66 of them.
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…
Motivated by the results for Magic: The Gathering presented in [CBH20] and [Bid20], we study a (different) computability problem about winning strategies in Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, a popular card game developed and published by Konami.…
Graph labellings have been a very fruitful area of research in the last four decades. However, despite the staggering number of papers published in the field (over 1000), few general results are available, and most papers deal with…
Let $n, k$ be positive integers. The $(k+1)$-star avoidance game on $K_n$ is played as follows. Two players take it in turn to claim a (previously unclaimed) edge of the complete graph on $n$ vertices. The first player to claim all edges of…
We discuss four famous card games that can help learn linear algebra. The games are: SET, Socks, Spot it!, and EvenQuads. We describe the game in the language of vector, affine, and projective spaces. We also show how these games are…
We study a general scenario where confidential information is distributed among a group of agents who wish to share it in such a way that the data becomes common knowledge among them but an eavesdropper intercepting their communications…
This paper focuses on "tracing player knowledge" in educational games. Specifically, given a set of concepts or skills required to master a game, the goal is to estimate the likelihood with which the current player has mastery of each of…