Related papers: Intransitive dice tournament is not quasirandom

The group draw of a sports tournament requires assigning teams to groups of (almost) the same size. The most important criteria for a draw procedure are balance, randomness, and transparency, which could not be satisfied simultaneously if…

Consider a 4-player version of Matching Pennies where a team of three players competes against the Devil. Each player simultaneously says "Heads" or "Tails". The team wins if all four choices match; otherwise the Devil wins. If all team…

When a thick cylindrical coin is tossed in the air and lands without bouncing on an inelastic substrate, it ends up on its face or its side. We account for the rigid body dynamics of spin and precession and calculate the probability…

Suppose we have $n$ dice, each with $s$ faces (assume $s\geq n$). On the first turn, roll all of them, and remove from play those that rolled an $n$. Roll all of the remaining dice. In general, if at a certain turn you are left with $k$…

We prove that every $n$-vertex tournament $G$ has an acyclic subgraph with chromatic number at least $n^{5/9-o(1)}$, while there exists an $n$-vertex tournament $G$ whose every acyclic subgraph has chromatic number at most $n^{3/4+o(1)}$.…

In 2000 Allen Schwenk, using a well-known mathematical model of matchplay tournaments in which the probability of one player beating another in a single match is fixed for each pair of players, showed that the classical single-elimination,…

Real world tournaments are almost always intransitive. Recent works have noted that parametric models which assume $d$ dimensional node representations can effectively model intransitive tournaments. However, nothing is known about the…

Suppose $\mathbb{F}$ is a field and let $\mathbf{a} := (a_1, a_2, \dotsc)$ be a sequence of non-zero elements in $\mathbb{F}$. For $\mathbf{a}_n := (a_1, \dotsc, a_n)$, we consider the family $\mathcal{M}_n(\mathbf{a})$ of $n \times n$…

We study the relationship between tournaments and random walks. This connection was first observed by Erd\H{o}s and Moser. Winston and Kleitman came close to showing that $S_n=\Theta(4^n/n^{5/2})$. Building on this, and works by Tak\'acs,…

There is a growing need for discrete choice models that account for the complex nature of human choices, escaping traditional behavioral assumptions such as the transitivity of pairwise preferences. Recently, several parametric models of…

According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…

Two possibly unfair $n$-sided dice, both labelled $1, 2, \ldots, n$, are rolled, and the sum is recorded. How should the dice's sides be weighted so that the resulting sum is closest to the uniform distribution on $2, 3, \ldots, 2n$? We…

Understanding the likelihood for an election to be tied is a classical topic in many disciplines including social choice, game theory, political science, and public choice. Despite a large body of literature and the common belief that ties…

The seminal Bradley-Terry model exhibits transitivity, i.e., the property that the probabilities of player A beating B and B beating C give the probability of A beating C, with these probabilities determined by a skill parameter for each…

Consider the following probability puzzle: A fair coin is flipped n times. For each HT in the resulting sequence, Bob gets a point, and for each HH Alice gets a point. Who is more likely to win? We provide a proof that Bob wins more often…

In a recent work Conger and Howald derived asymptotic formulas for the randomness, after shuffling, of decks with repeating cards or all-distinct decks dealt into hands. In the latter case the deck does not need to be fully randomized: the…

We consider the following one-player game called Dundee. We are given a deck consisting of s_i cards of Value i, where i=1,...,v, and an integer m\le s_1+...+s_v. There are m rounds. In each round, the player names a number between 1 and v…

We consider a random knockout tournament among players $1, \ldots, n$, in which each match involves two players. The match format is specified by the number of matches played in each round, where the constitution of the matches in a round…

A casino offers the following game. There are three cups each containing a die. You are being told that the dice in the cups are all the same, but possibly nonstandard. For a bet of \$1, the game master shakes all three cups and lets you…

We compute the whole asymptotic expansion of the probability that a large uniform labeled graph is connected, and of the probability that a large uniform labeled tournament is irreducible. In both cases, we provide a combinatorial…