Related papers: Gambler's Ruin? Some Aspects of Coin Tossing
In the classical leader election procedure all players toss coins independently and those who get tails leave the game, while those who get heads move to the next round where the procedure is repeated. We investigate a generalizion of this…
We construct a statistical ensemble of games, where in each independent subensemble we have two players playing the same game. We derive the mean payoffs per move of the representative players of the game, and we evaluate all the…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
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…
In Texas hold'em, after an all-in bet is made and called before the flop, the turn, or the river, the two players sometimes agree to run it $n$ times, meaning that the remaining five, two, or one cards are dealt out not just once but $n$…
The tiling problem has been a famous problem that has appeared in many Mathematics problems. Many of its solutions are rooted in high-level Mathematics. Thus we hope to tackle this problem using more elementary Mathematics concepts. In this…
We use Markov chains and numerical linear algebra -- and several CPU hours -- to determine the expected number of coins in a person's possession under certain conditions. We identify the spending strategy that results in the minimum…
If $T$ is an $n$-vertex tournament with a given number of $3$-cycles, what can be said about the number of its $4$-cycles? The most interesting range of this problem is where $T$ is assumed to have $c\cdot n^3$ cyclic triples for some $c>0$…
In this work, we examine a generic class of simple distributed balls-into-bins algorithms. Exploiting the strong concentration bounds that apply to balls-into-bins games, we provide an iterative method to compute accurate estimates of the…
We present three versions of the classic two-pile game \textsc{one-or-one-or-one-of-both} generalized to the multi-pile context. In each case, we explore the resulting $\mathcal{P}$-positions. In the first version, there is a simple…
What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given \$25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61…
In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…
Penney's Ante exhibits non-transitivity when two target strings race to appear in a shared stream of coin tosses. We study instead independent string races, where each player observes their own independent and identically distributed…
There are 134,459 distinct initial hands at the video poker game Jacks or Better, taking suit exchangeability into account. A computer program can determine the optimal strategy (i.e., which cards to hold) for each such hand, but a complete…
Noga Alon and Yaakov Malinovsky recently studied the following game: you start at 0, and keep rolling a fair standard die, and add the outcomes until the sum happens to be prime. We generalize this in several ways, illustrating the power of…
Is there a joint distribution of $n$ random variables over the natural numbers, such that they always form an increasing sequence and whenever you take two subsets of the set of random variables of the same cardinality, their distribution…
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…
General upper tail estimates are given for counting edges in a random induced subhypergraph of a fixed hypergraph H, with an easy proof by estimating the moments. As an application we consider the numbers of arithmetic progressions and…
In a guessing game, players guess the value of a random real number selected using some probability density function. The winner may be determined in various ways; for example, a winner can be a player whose guess is closest in magnitude to…
We consider in this paper an urn and ball problem with replacement, where balls are with different colors and are drawn uniformly from a unique urn. The numbers of balls with a given color are i.i.d. random variables with a heavy tailed…