Related papers: A Probabilistic Two-Pile Game
The graph grabbing game is played on a non-negatively weighted connected graph by Alice and Bob who alternately claim a non-cut vertex from the remaining graph, where Alice plays first, to maximize the weights on their respective claimed…
Imagine that there are two bins to which balls are added sequentially, and each incoming ball joins a bin with probability proportional to the p-th power of the number of balls already there. A general result says that if p>1/2, there…
We consider two-player stochastic games played on a finite graph for infinitely many rounds. Stochastic games generalize both Markov decision processes (MDP) by adding an adversary player, and two-player deterministic games by adding…
We investigate the expected number of calls required to achieve Bingo in a generalized (n,m)-Bingo game, where each n x n card is filled by sampling n numbers from m possible values per column. Using the inclusion-exclusion principle, we…
We introduce a two-player game in which one and his/her opponent attempt to pack as many ``prisoners'' as possible on the squares of an n-by-n checkerboard; each prisoner has to be ``protected'' by at least as many guards as the number of…
Consider a system of \(n\) players in which each initially starts on a different team. At each time step, we select an individual winner and an individual loser randomly and the loser joins the winner's team. The resulting Markov chain and…
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…
A general position set of a graph $G$ is a set of vertices $S$ in $G$ such that no three vertices from $S$ lie on a common shortest path. In this paper we introduce and study the general position achievement game. The game is played on a…
We study infinite two-player win/lose games $(A,B,W)$ where $A,B$ are finite and $W \subseteq (A \times B)^\omega$. At each round Player 1 and Player 2 concurrently choose one action in $A$ and $B$, respectively. Player 1 wins iff the…
A gambler moves between the vertices $1, \ldots, n$ of a graph using the probability distribution $p_{1}, \ldots, p_{n}$. Multiple cops pursue the gambler on the graph, only being able to move between adjacent vertices. We investigate the…
Toral introduced so-called cooperative Parrondo games, in which there are N players (3 or more) arranged in a circle. At each turn one player is randomly chosen to play. He plays either game A or game B, depending on the strategy. Game A…
A long-standing open problem in algorithmic game theory asks whether or not there is a polynomial time algorithm to compute a Nash equilibrium in a random bimatrix game. We study random win-lose games, where the entries of the $n\times n$…
In pickleball doubles with conventional side-out scoring, points are scored only by the serving team. The serve alternates during a game, with each team serving until it has faulted twice, except at the beginning of the game, in which case…
The Tower of Hanoi game is a classical puzzle in recreational mathematics (Lucas 1883) which also has a strong record in pure mathematics. In a borderland between these two areas we find the characterization of the minimal number of moves,…
In his list of open problems, Martin Erickson described a certain game: "Two players alternately put queens on an n x n chess board so that each new queen is not in range of any queen already on the board (the color of the queens is…
This work explains how to utilize earlier results by P. Diaconis, K. Houston-Edwards and the second author to estimate probabilities related to the 4-player gambler ruin problem. For instance, we show that the probability that a very…
We study 2-player impartial games of the form take-away which produce P-positions (second player winning positions) corresponding to complementary Beatty sequences, given by the continued fractions (1;k,1,k,1,...) and (k+1;k,1,k,1,...). Our…
In a seminal paper, Meyer [David Meyer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 1052 (1999)] described the advantages of quantum game theory by looking at the classical penny flip game. A player using a quantum strategy can win against a classical player…
We define a variant of the two-dimensional Silver Dollar game. Two coins are placed on a chessboard of unbounded size, and two players take turns choosing one of the coins and moving it. Coins are to be moved to the left or upward…
We consider the $n\times n$ game of Phutball. It is shown that, given an arbitrary position of stones on the board, it is a PSPACE-hard problem to determine whether the specified player can win the game, regardless of the opponent's choices…