Related papers: Physical Zero-Knowledge Proof for Ripple Effect
A comparison of escape rates from one and from two holes in an experimental container (e.g. a laser trap) can be used to obtain information about the dynamics inside the container. If this dynamics is simple enough one can hope to obtain…
We identify a choiceless variation of the box game paradox, in which players predict unknown real numbers with near-perfect accuracy despite lacking any useful information. We also verify that choice is necessary in the solution of the…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…
In this paper we model a game such that all strategies are non-revealing, with imperfect recall and incomplete information. We also introduce a modified sliding-block code as a linear transformation which generates common knowledge of how…
Mirror games were invented by Garg and Schnieder (ITCS 2019). Alice and Bob take turns (with Alice playing first) in declaring numbers from the set {1,2, ...2n}. If a player picks a number that was previously played, that player loses and…
Zero forcing is a one-player game played on a graph. The player chooses some set of vertices to color, then iteratively applies a color change rule: If all but one of a colored vertex's neighbors are colored, color (i.e. "force") the…
Protecting secrets is a key challenge in our contemporary information-based era. In common situations, however, revealing secrets appears unavoidable, for instance, when identifying oneself in a bank to retrieve money. In turn, this may…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…
Design and scientific investigation are recognized as key components of undergraduate physics laboratory curricula. In light of this, many successful lab programs have been developed to train students to develop these abilities, and…
Introducing the simplest of all No-Signalling Games: the RGB Game where two verifiers interrogate two provers, Alice and Bob, far enough from each other that communication between them is too slow to be possible. Each prover may be…
A pile-scramble shuffle is one of the most effective shuffles in card-based cryptography. Indeed, many card-based protocols are constructed from pile-scramble shuffles. This article aims to study the power of pile-scramble shuffles. In…
We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…
Tatami puzzles are pencil puzzles with an objective to partition a rectangular grid into rectangular regions such that no four regions share a corner point, as well as satisfying other constraints. In this paper, we develop a physical…
We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…
We introduce the game INFLUENCE, a scoring combinatorial game, played on a directed graph where each vertex is either colored black or white. The two players, Black and White play alternately by taking a vertex of their color and all its…
This paper is about the following question: How many riffle shuffles mix a deck of card for games such as blackjack and bridge? An object that comes up in answering this question is the descent polynomial associated with pairs of decks,…
In the Nikoli pencil-and-paper game Double Choco, a puzzle consists of an m $\times$ n grid of cells of white or gray color, separated by dotted lines where each cell possibly contains an integer. The goal is to partition the grid into…
Consider the following experiment: a deck with $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is randomly shuffled, and a guesser attempts to guess the cards sequentially as they are drawn. Each time a guess is made, some amount of "feedback" is…
In this paper, we propose a physical protocol to verify the first nonzero term of a sequence using a deck of cards. The protocol lets a prover show the value of the first nonzero term of a given sequence to a verifier without revealing…
The card-cyclic-to-random shuffle is the card shuffle where the $n$ cards are labeled $1,\ldots,n$ according to their starting positions. Then the cards are mixed by first picking card $1$ from the deck and reinserting it at a uniformly…