Related papers: The Exact Query Complexity of Yes-No Permutation M…
Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…
The game of Hangman is a classical asymmetric two player game in which one player, the setter, chooses a secret word from a language, that the other player, the guesser, tries to discover through single letter matching queries, answered by…
In this paper we show that the Mastermind Satisfiability Problem (MSP) is NP-complete. The Mastermind is a popular game which can be turned into a logical puzzle called Mastermind Satisfiability Problem in a similar spirit to the…
The ExactlyN problem in the number-on-forehead (NOF) communication setting asks $k$ players, each of whom can see every input but their own, if the $k$ input numbers add up to $N$. Introduced by Chandra, Furst and Lipton in 1983, ExactlyN…
We study the CHAIN communication problem introduced by Cormode et al. [ICALP 2019]. It is a generalization of the well-studied INDEX problem. For $k\geq 1$, in CHAIN$_{n,k}$, there are $k$ instances of INDEX, all with the same answer. They…
Common knowledge is crucial for safe group coordination. In its absence, humans must rely on shared knowledge, which is inherently limited in depth and therefore prone to coordination failures, because any finite-order knowledge attribution…
In this paper we study one-round key-agreement protocols analogous to Merkle's puzzles in the random oracle model. The players Alice and Bob are allowed to query a random permutation oracle $n$ times and upon their queries and…
We prove an explicit upper bound on the amount of entanglement required by any strategy in a two-player cooperative game with classical questions and quantum answers. Specifically, we show that every strategy for a game with n-bit questions…
How can we generate a permutation of the numbers $1$ through $n$ so that it is hard to guess the next element given the history so far? The twist is that the generator of the permutation (the ``Dealer") has limited memory, while the…
This paper establishes the exact comparison complexity of finding an element repeated $n$ times in a $2n$-element array containing $n+1$ distinct values, under the equality-comparison model with $O(1)$ extra space. We present a simple…
We propose a two-agent game wherein a questioner must be able to conjure discerning questions between sentences, incorporate responses from an answerer, and keep track of a hypothesis state. The questioner must be able to understand the…
Given a partition of a graph into connected components, the membership oracle asserts whether any two vertices of the graph lie in the same component or not. We prove that for $n\ge k\ge 2$, learning the components of an $n$-vertex hidden…
Consider the following one-player game. Take a well-formed sequence of opening and closing brackets. As a move, the player can pair any opening bracket with any closing bracket to its right, erasing them. The goal is to re-pair (erase) the…
We study two-player games with alternating moves played on infinite trees. Our main focus is on the case where the trees are full (regular) and the winning set is open (with respect to the product topology on the tree). Gale and Stewart…
We introduce and study Certificate Game complexity, a measure of complexity based on the probability of winning a game where two players are given inputs with different function values and are asked to output some index $i$ such that…
In games with imperfect recall, players may forget the sequence of decisions they made in the past. When players also forget whether they have already encountered their current decision point, they are said to be absent-minded. Solving…
A tournament is a complete directed graph. It is well known that every tournament contains at least one vertex v such that every other vertex is reachable from v by a path of length at most 2. All such vertices v are called *kings* of the…
We consider the basic problem of learning an unknown partition of $n$ elements into at most $k$ sets using simple queries that reveal information about a small subset of elements. Our starting point is the well-studied pairwise same-set…
In the first-order query model for zero-sum $K\times K$ matrix games, players observe the expected pay-offs for all their possible actions under the randomized action played by their opponent. This classical model has received renewed…
In this paper we introduce novel algorithmic strategies for effciently playing two-player games in which the players have different or identical player roles. In the case of identical roles, the players compete for the same objective (that…