Related papers: Prisoners, Rooms, and Lightswitches
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
The aim of this paper is to solve the "gift exchange" problem: you are one of n players, and there are n wrapped gifts on display; when your turn comes, you can either choose any of the remaining wrapped gifts, or you can "steal" a gift…
Recognise that people have many, possibly conflicting, aspects to their personality. We hypothesise that each separate characteristic of a personality may be treated as an independent player in a non-zero sum many player game. This idea is…
Given $n$ buttons and $n$ bulbs so that the $i$th button toggles the $i$th bulb and perhaps some other bulbs, we compute the sharp lower bound on the number of bulbs that can be lit regardless of the action of the buttons. In the previous…
In sorting situations where the final destination of each item is known, it is natural to repeatedly choose items and place them where they belong, allowing the intervening items to shift by one to make room. (In fact, a special case of…
We study a multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards exhibit regime switching. Specifically, the distributions of the random rewards generated from all arms are modulated by a common underlying state modeled as a finite-state Markov…
The notion of noncrossing partitions of a partially ordered set (poset) is introduced here. When the poset in question is $[n]=\{1,2,\dots, n\}$ with the complete order of natural numbers, conventional noncrossing partitions arise. The…
This paper examines the integration of computational complexity into game theoretic models. The example focused on is the Prisoner's Dilemma, repeated for a finite length of time. We show that a minimal bound on the players' computational…
We consider a Cops-and-Robber game played on the subsets of an $n$-set. The robber starts at the full set; the cops start at the empty set. On each turn, the robber moves down one level by discarding an element, and each cop moves up one…
A configuration of a graph is an assignment of one of two states, on or off, to each vertex of it. A regular move at a vertex changes the states of the neighbors of that vertex. A valid move is a regular move at an on vertex. The following…
The rational solution of the Monty Hall problem unsettles many people. Most people, including the authors, think it feels wrong to switch the initial choice of one of the three doors, despite having fully accepted the mathematical proof for…
We study the evolution of cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game where players are allowed to establish new interactions with others. By employing a simple coevolutionary rule entailing only two crucial parameters, we find that…
We investigate the stabilizability of discrete-time linear switched systems, when the sole control action of the controller is the switching signal, and when the controller has access to the state of the system in real time. Despite their…
We study environments in which agents are randomly matched to play a Prisoner's Dilemma, and each player observes a few of the partner's past actions against previous opponents. We depart from the existing related literature by allowing a…
Distinguishability takes a crucial rule in studying observability of hybrid system such as switched system. Recently, for two linear systems, Lou and Si gave a condition not only necessary but also sufficient to the distinguishability of…
We characterize the minimum-length sequences of independent lazy simple transpositions whose composition is a uniformly random permutation. For every reduced word of the reverse permutation there is exactly one valid way to assign…
We study the m-eternal domination problem from the perspective of the attacker. For many graph classes, the minimum required number of guards to defend eternally is known. By definition, if the defender has less than the required number of…
We consider lattice walks in $\R^k$ confined to the region $0<x_1<x_2...<x_k$ with fixed (but arbitrary) starting and end points. The walks are required to be "reflectable", that is, we assume that the number of paths can be counted using…
In repeated interactions between individuals, we do not expect that exactly the same situation will occur from one time to another. Contrary to what is common in models of repeated games in the literature, most real situations may differ a…
I consider the natural infinitary variations of the games Wordle and Mastermind, as well as their game-theoretic variations Absurdle and Madstermind, considering these games with infinitely long words and infinite color sequences and…