Related papers: The Problem of Pawns
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
We study the complexity of computing equilibria in binary public goods games on undirected graphs. In such a game, players correspond to vertices in a graph and face a binary choice of performing an action, or not. Each player's decision…
In the chapter "Magic with a Matrix" in \emph{Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions} (1988), Martin Gardner describes a delightful "party trick" to fill the squares of a $d$-by-$d$ chessboard with nonnegative integers such that…
Two-player complete-information game trees are perhaps the simplest possible setting for studying general-sum games and the computational problem of finding equilibria. These games admit a simple bottom-up algorithm for finding subgame…
We consider the computation of a Nash equilibrium in attack and defense games on networks (Bloch et al. [1]). We prove that a Nash Equilibrium of the game can be computed in polynomial time with respect to the number of nodes in the…
This is the second in a sequence of three papers investigating the question for which positive integers $m$ there exists a maximal antichain of size $m$ in the Boolean lattice $B_n$ (the power set of $[n]:=\{1,2,\dots,n\}$, ordered by…
We consider the allocation of $m$ balls into $n$ bins with incomplete information. In the classical Two-Choice process a ball first queries the load of two randomly chosen bins and is then placed in the least loaded bin. In our setting,…
Composition theory can be used to analyze and enumerate the number of ways a dealer in Blackjack can reach any given point total. The rules of Blackjack provide several restrictions on the number of compositions of a given number. While…
Let k_r(n,m) denote the minimum number of r-cliques in graphs with n vertices and m edges. For r=3,4 we give a lower bound on k_r(n,m) that approximates k_r(n,m) with an error smaller than n^r/(n^2-2m). The solution is based on a constraint…
We investigate the adversarial bandit problem with multiple plays under semi-bandit feedback. We introduce a highly efficient algorithm that asymptotically achieves the performance of the best switching $m$-arm strategy with minimax optimal…
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…
Two standard algorithms for approximately solving two-player zero-sum concurrent reachability games are value iteration and strategy iteration. We prove upper and lower bounds of 2^(m^(Theta(N))) on the worst case number of iterations…
Using the bijection between partitions and vacillating tableaux, we establish a correspondence between pairs of noncrossing free Dyck paths of length $2n$ and noncrossing partitions of $[2n+1]$ with $n+1$ blocks. In terms of the number of…
Two-Bar Charts Packing Problem is to pack $n$ two-bar charts (2-BCs) in a minimal number of unit-capacity bins. This problem generalizes the strongly NP-hard Bin Packing Problem. We prove that the problem remains strongly NP-hard even if…
Given $k\ge 3$ heaps of tokens. The moves of the 2-player game introduced here are to either take a positive number of tokens from at most $k-1$ heaps, or to remove the {\sl same} positive number of tokens from all the $k$ heaps. We analyse…
This paper presents an efficient algorithm to solve the sleeping bandit with multiple plays problem in the context of an online recommendation system. The problem involves bounded, adversarial loss and unknown i.i.d. distributions for arm…
A chessboard has the property that every row and every column has as many white squares as black squares. In this mostly methodological note, we address the problem of counting such rectangular arrays with a fixed (numeric) number of rows,…
A human-like chess engine should mimic the style, errors, and consistency of a strong human player rather than maximize playing strength. We show that training from move sequences alone forces a model to learn two capabilities: state…
A homothetic packing of squares is any set of various-size squares with the same orientation where no two squares have overlapping interiors. If all $n$ squares have the same size then we can have up to roughly $4n$ contacts by arranging…
Let $P$ be a partially ordered set. We prove that if $n$ is sufficiently large, then there exists a packing $\mathcal{P}$ of copies of $P$ in the Boolean lattice $(2^{[n]},\subset)$ that covers almost every element of $2^{[n]}$:…