Related papers: Ludometrics: Luck, and How to Measure It
We propose the study of mathematical ludology, which aims to formally interrogate questions of interest to game studies and game design in particular. The goal is to extend our mathematical understanding of complex games beyond…
We use machine learning to provide a tractable measure of the amount of predictable variation in the data that a theory captures, which we call its "completeness." We apply this measure to three problems: assigning certain equivalents to…
Game theory is the standard tool used to model strategic interactions in evolutionary biology and social science. Traditional game theory studies the equilibria of simple games. But is traditional game theory applicable if the game is…
Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
The game theory techniques are used to find the equilibrium of a market. Game theory refers to the ways in which strategic interactions among economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents,…
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…
Game theory, as an analytical tool, is frequently utilized to analyze human behavior in social science research. With the high alignment between the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and humans, a promising research direction is to…
Gameplay research about experiential phenomena is a challenging undertaking, given the variety of experiences that gamers encounter when playing and which currently do not have a formal taxonomy, such as flow, immersion, boredom, and fun.…
This paper presents a data-driven statistical framework to quantify the role of skill in games, addressing the long-standing question of whether success in a game is predominantly driven by skill or chance. We analyze player level data from…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
This work contains the mathematical exploration of a few prototypical games in which central concepts from statistics and probability theory naturally emerge. The first two kinds of games are termed Fisher and Bayesian games, which are…
Quantitative measures of randomness in games are useful for game design and have implications for gambling law. We treat the outcome of a game as a random variable and derive a closed-form expression and estimator for the variance in the…
Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…
We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…
Game-theoretic probability uses the structure of gambles to define a concept like probability, but which is more flexible and robust. We show that results in game-theoretic probability can be thought of as minimax theorems for specific…
This paper investigates the performance of different general-game-playing heuristics for games in the Ludii general game system. Based on these results, we train several regression learning models to predict the performance of these…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…
Game Theory concepts have been successfully applied in a wide variety of domains over the past decade. Sports and games are one of the popular areas of game theory application owing to its merits and benefits in solving complex scenarios.…
Matrix games constitute a fundamental problem of game theory and describe a situation of two players with completely conflicting interests. We show how methods from statistical mechanics can be used to investigate the statistical properties…