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Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…
Suppose you and your friend both do $n$ tosses of an unfair coin with probability of heads equal to $\alpha$. What is the behavior of the probability that you obtain at least $d$ more heads than your friend if you make $r$ additional…
Suppose that $X$ is a bounded-degree polynomial with nonnegative coefficients on the $p$-biased discrete hypercube. Our main result gives sharp estimates on the logarithmic upper tail probability of $X$ whenever an associated extremal…
The game of nim, with its simple rules, its elegant solution and its historical importance is the quintessence of a combinatorial game, which is why it led to so many generalizations and modifications. We present a modification with a new…
Can a probabilistic gambler get arbitrarily rich when all deterministic gamblers fail? We study this problem in the context of algorithmic randomness, introducing a new notion -- almost everywhere computable randomness. A binary sequence…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…
Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…
Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target…
We use the holonomic ansatz to estimate the asymptotic behavior, in $T$, of the average maximal number of balls in a bin that is obtained when one throws uniformly at random (without replacement) $r$ balls into $n$ bins, $T$ times. Our…
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…
The author presents two tricks to accelerate depth-first search algorithms for a class of combinatorial puzzle problems, such as tiling a tray by a fixed set of polyominoes. The first trick is to implement each assumption of the search with…
This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…
From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…
For any configuration of pebbles on the nodes of a graph, a pebbling move replaces two pebbles on one node by one pebble on an adjacent node. A cover pebbling is a move sequence ending with no empty nodes. The number of pebbles needed for a…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
This paper studies Ebert's hat problem for three and four players and two colors, where the probabilities of the colors may be different for each player. Our goal is to maximize the probability of winning the game and to describe winning…
We consider the generalized game Lights Out played on a graph and investigate the following question: for a given positive integer $n$, what is the probability that a graph chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices…
Let $a$, $b$, and $n$ be integers with $0<a<b<n$. In a certain two-player probabilistic chip-collecting game, Alice tosses a coin to determine whether she collects $a$ chips or $b$ chips. If Alice collects $a$ chips, then Bob collects $b$…
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…
Throughout history, recreational mathematics has always played a prominent role in advancing research. Following in this tradition, in this paper we extend some recent work with crazy sequential representations of numbers- equations made of…