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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…
We demonstrate that the free motion of any two-dimensional rigid body colliding elastically with two parallel, flat walls is equivalent to a billiard system. Using this equivalence, we analyze the integrable and chaotic properties of this…
Inspired by the Japanese game Pachinko, we study simple (perfectly "inelastic" collisions) dynamics of a unit ball falling amidst point obstacles (pins) in the plane. A classic example is that a checkerboard grid of pins produces the…
We study the dynamics of a bouncing coin whose motion is restricted to the two-dimensional plane. Such coin model is equivalent to the system of two equal masses connected by a rigid rod, making elastic collisions with a flat boundary. We…
This paper studies the trade-off between two different kinds of pure exploration: breadth versus depth. The most biased coin problem asks how many total coin flips are required to identify a "heavy" coin from an infinite bag containing both…
In this paper we consider the Stochastic Matching problem, which is motivated by applications in kidney exchange and online dating. We are given an undirected graph in which every edge is assigned a probability of existence and a positive…
After a general introduction, the thesis is divided into four parts. In the first, we discuss the task of coin tossing, principally in order to highlight the effect different physical theories have on security in a straightforward manner,…
Under investigation in this paper is the dynamics and probability of heads in the toss of a coin with symmetric inhomogeneous density. Such coins are assumed to have diagonal inertia matrix. The rotational motion of the coin is determined…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
This paper looks into the gain or loss from rolling a fair die multiple times and choosing the highest or lowest number as the outcome over rolling the die just once. Specifically, this paper gives a general formula for the expected value…
Machine learning and data mining algorithms have been increasingly used recently to support decision-making systems in many areas of high societal importance such as healthcare, education, or security. While being very efficient in their…
Tournament solutions provide methods for selecting the "best" alternatives from a tournament and have found applications in a wide range of areas. Previous work has shown that several well-known tournament solutions almost never rule out…
Two players alternate tossing a biased coin where the probability of getting heads is p. The current player is awarded alpha points for tails and alpha+beta for heads. The first player reaching n points wins. For a completely unfair coin…
A coin is just a two sided dice. Recently, Mochon proved that quantum weak coin flipping with an arbitrarily small bias is possible. However, the use of quantum resources to allow N remote distrustful parties to roll an N-sided dice has yet…
Faced with a sequence of N binary events, such as coin flips (or Ising spins), it is natural to ask whether these events reflect some underlying dynamic signals or are just random. Plausible models for the dynamics of hidden biases lead to…
In the first part of this paper, we obtain symmetric formulae for the probabilities that a plane convex body hits exactly 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 triangles of a lattice of congruent triangles in the plane. Furthermore, a very simple formula for…
We consider the Stochastic Matching problem, which is motivated by applications in kidney exchange and online dating. In this problem, we are given an undirected graph. Each edge is assigned a known, independent probability of existence and…
We use the idea of the broken stick problem (which goes back to Poincare) and calculate the corresponding probabilities for the cases in which the three broken part are: the medians in a triangle, the altitudes, radii of excircles, angle…
Accounting for model uncertainty in risk management and option pricing leads to infinite dimensional optimization problems which are both analytically and numerically intractable. In this article we study when this hurdle can be overcome…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…