Related papers: Waiting Times for Ties in Random Competitions
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
When a game involves many agents or when communication between agents is not possible, it is useful to resort to distributed learning where each agent acts in complete autonomy without any information on the other agents' situations.…
The game of bridge consists of two stages: bidding and playing. While playing is proved to be relatively easy for computer programs, bidding is very challenging. During the bidding stage, each player knowing only his/her own cards needs to…
Contention resolution schemes have proven to be an incredibly powerful concept which allows to tackle a broad class of problems. The framework has been initially designed to handle submodular optimization under various types of constraints,…
In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…
Bipartite matching problem is to study two disjoint groups of agents who need to be matched pairwise. It can be applied to many real-world scenarios and explain many social phenomena. In this article, we study the effect of competition on…
Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the…
We investigate trade-offs in static and dynamic evaluation of hierarchical queries with arbitrary free variables. In the static setting, the trade-off is between the time to partially compute the query result and the delay needed to…
In a distributed game we imagine a team Player engaging a team Opponent in a distributed fashion. Such games and their strategies have been formalised in concurrent games based on event structures. However there are limitations in founding…
Nowadays, scientific databases have become the bread-and-butter of particle physicists. These databases must be maintained and checked repeatedly to insure the accuracy of their content. The COMPETE collaboration aims at motivating data…
Delay games are two-player games of infinite duration in which one player may delay her moves to obtain a lookahead on her opponent's moves. We consider delay games with winning conditions expressed in weak monadic second order logic with…
The relationship between topology and dynamics of complex systems has motivated continuing interest from the scientific community. In the present work, we address this interesting topic from the perspective of simple games, involving two…
From the viewpoint of networks, a ranking system for players or teams in sports is equivalent to a centrality measure for sports networks, whereby a directed link represents the result of a single game. Previously proposed network-based…
We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
Motivated by a problem posed by Aldous, our goal is to find the maximal-entropy win-martingale: In a sports game between two teams, the chance the home team wins is initially $x_0 \in (0,1)$ and finally 0 or 1. As an idealization we take a…
In this paper we bring a novel approach to the theory of tournament rankings. We combine two different theories that are widely used to establish rankings of populations after a given tournament. First, we use the statistical approach of…
This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for a pair of randomised stopping times to form a saddle point of a zero-sum Dynkin game with partial and/or asymmetric information across players. The framework is non-Markovian and…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…