Related papers: Gambler's Ruin? Some Aspects of Coin Tossing
In repeated games, players choose actions concurrently at each step. We consider a parameterized setting of repeated games in which the players form a population of an arbitrary size. Their utility functions encode a reachability objective.…
The usual $n$-in-a-row game is a positional game in which two player alternately claim points in $\bb{Z}^2$ with the winner being the first player to claim $n$ consecutive points in a line. We consider a variant of the game, suggested by…
We study a coin-tossing model used by a ratings agency to justify the sale of constant proportion debt obligations (CPDOs), and prove that it was impossible for CPDOs to achieve in a finite lifetime the Cash-In event of doubling its…
In the game "Super Six", after successfully getting rid of a stick by rolling with the die a number that is not occupied, the player has the choice to continue to roll the die or to stop and to hand over the die to their opponent. The…
We provide a mechanism that uses two biased coins and implements any distribution on a finite set of elements, in such a way that even if the outcomes of one of the coins is determined by an adversary, the final distribution remains…
We extend the classical coupon collector's problem to one in which two collectors are simultaneously and independently seeking collections of $d$ coupons. We find, in finite terms, the probability that the two collectors finish at the same…
A random jigsaw puzzle is constructed by arranging $n^2$ square pieces into an $n \times n$ grid and assigning to each edge of a piece one of $q$ available colours uniformly at random, with the restriction that touching edges receive the…
In Gambler's Ruin when both players start with the same amount of money, we show the playing time stochastically increases when the games are made more fair. We give two different arguments for this fact that extend results from…
We count the number and patterns of pairs and tuples of independent events in a simple random experiment: first a fair coin is flipped and then a fair die is tossed. The first number, equal to 888,888, suggest that there are some open…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player zero-sum graph games with a reachability objective. The problem is to compute the winning probability as well as the optimal strategies of both players. In this paper, we compare the three…
When flipping a fair coin, let $W = L_1L_2...L_N$ with $L_i\in\{H,T\}$ be a binary word of length $N=2$ or $N=3$. In this paper, we establish second- and third-order linear recurrence relations and their generating functions to discuss the…
Suppose a gambler starts with a fortune in (0,1) and wishes to attain a fortune of 1 by making a sequence of bets. Assume thay whenever the gambler stakes the amount s, the gambler's fortune increases by s with probability w and decreases…
We give an estimate of the number of geometrically distinct open tours $\G$ for a knight on a chessboard. We use a randomization of Warnsdorff rule to implement importance sampling in a backtracking scheme, correcting the observed bias of…
We study an evolutionary game of chance in which the probabilities for different outcomes (e.g., heads or tails) depend on the amount wagered on those outcomes. The game is perhaps the simplest possible probabilistic game in which…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
Each of two players, by turns, rolls a dice several times accumulating the successive scores until he decides to stop, or he rolls an ace. When stopping, the accumulated turn score is added to the player account and the dice is given to his…
N players are randomly fitted with a colored hat (q different colors). All players guess simultaneously the color of their own hat observing only the hat colors of the other N-1 players. The team wins if all players guess right. No…
FAST problem is finding minimum feedback arc set problem in tournaments. In this paper we present some algorithms that are similar to sorting algorithms for FAST problem and we analyze them. We present Pseudo_InsertionSort algorithm for…
We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of…
In this article, we look at a hat-guessing game, in which each player must guess the color of their own hat while only seeing the hats of the other players. We focus on the case of two hat colors and a countably infinite number of players.…