Related papers: How strong can the Parrondo effect be? II
In a recent article in American Scientist, Theodore Hill described a coin-tossing game whose pay-off is the number of heads over the total number of throws. Suppose that at a given point during the game you have 5 heads and 3 tails, should…
When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner's reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in…
We consider a setting in which a principal gets to choose which game from some given set is played by a group of agents. The principal would like to choose a game that favors one of the players, the social preferences of the players, or the…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
How many fair coin tosses to choose 1 of $n$ options with uniform probability? Although a probability problem, the solution is essentially number-theoretic, with special roles for Mersenne numbers, Fermat numbers, and the haupt exponent. We…
We consider the general model of zero-sum repeated games (or stochastic games with signals), and assume that one of the players is fully informed and controls the transitions of the state variable. We prove the existence of the uniform…
We introduce a way to parameterize automata and games on finite graphs with natural numbers. The parameters are accessed essentially by allowing counting down from the parameter value to 0 and branching depending on whether 0 has been…
The Continuous-Time Random Walk (CTRW) formalism can be adapted to encompass stochastic processes with memory. In this article we will show how the random combination of two different unbiased CTRWs can give raise to a process with clear…
The value of a finite-state two-player zero-sum stochastic game with limit-average payoff can be approximated to within $\epsilon$ in time exponential in a polynomial in the size of the game times polynomial in logarithmic in…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the game. Such games are central in formal verification since they model the interaction between a…
Binomial distributions capture the probabilities of `heads' outcomes when a (biased) coin is tossed multiple times. The coin may be identified with a distribution on the two-element set {0,1}, where the 1 outcome corresponds to `head'. One…
Each vertex of the infinite $2$-dimensional square lattice graph is assigned, independently, a label that reads trap with probability $p$, target with probability $q$, and open with probability $(1-p-q)$, and each edge is assigned,…
A gambler walks into a hypothetical fair casino with a very real dollar bill, but by the time he leaves he's exchanged the dollar for a random amount of money. What is lost in the process? It may be that the gambler walks out at the end of…
We introduce a natural variant of weighted voting games, which we refer to as k-Prize Weighted Voting Games. Such games consist of n players with weights, and k prizes, of possibly differing values. The players form coalitions, and the i-th…
We study a game in which one keeps flipping a coin until a given finite string of heads and tails occurs. We find the expected number of coin flips to end the game when the ending string consists of at most four maximal runs of heads or…
We study a class of two-player zero-sum stochastic games known as \textit{blind stochastic games}, where players neither observe the state nor receive any information about it during the game. A central concept for analyzing long-duration…
Quantitative measures of randomness in games are useful for game design and have implications for gambling law. We treat the outcome of a game as a random variable and derive a closed-form expression and estimator for the variance in the…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player games with a reachability objective. The basic question asks whether one player can ensure reaching a given target with at least a given probability. A natural extension is games with a…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
We examine two-player games over finite weighted graphs with quantitative (mean-payoff or energy) objective, where one of the players additionally needs to satisfy a fairness objective. The specific fairness we consider is called 'strong…