Related papers: SURPRISE! and When to Schedule It
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…
Understanding how to engage users is a critical question in many applications. Previous research has shown that unexpected or astonishing events can attract user attention, leading to positive outcomes such as engagement and learning. In…
Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree…
The Elo rating system is a highly successful ranking algorithm for games of skill where, by construction, one team wins and the other loses. A primary limitation of the original Elo algorithm is its inability to predict information beyond a…
Why are some events more surprising than others? We propose that events that are more difficult to explain are those that are more surprising. The two experiments reported here test the impact of different event outcomes (Outcome-Type) and…
Information flow analysis is a powerful technique for reasoning about the sensitive information exposed by a program during its execution. While past work has proposed information theoretic metrics (e.g., Shannon entropy, min-entropy,…
Elo rating systems measure the approximate skill of each competitor in a game or sport. A competitor's rating increases when they win and decreases when they lose. Increasing one's rating can be difficult work; one must hone their skills…
We propose utilizing match-level suspense and surprise - which capture the entertainment utility created by competitive balance and outcome uncertainty for sports spectators - as alternative policy targets for league organizers and…
Video game designers often view confusion as undesirable, yet it is inevitable, as new players must adapt to new interfaces and mechanics in an increasingly varied and innovative game market, which is more popular than ever. Research…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…
League of Legends (LoL) is the most widely played multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game in the world. An important aspect of LoL is competitive ranked play, which utilizes a skill-based matchmaking system to form fair teams. However,…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
This article discusses in detail the rating system that won the kaggle competition "Chess Ratings: Elo vs the rest of the world". The competition provided a historical dataset of outcomes for chess games, and aimed to discover whether novel…
This paper focuses on the recommendation of events in the Social Web, and addresses the problem of finding if, and to which extent, certain features, which are peculiar to events, are relevant in predicting the users' interests and should…
The dynamic nature of esports makes the situation relatively complicated for average viewers. Esports broadcasting involves game expert casters, but the caster-dependent game commentary is not enough to fully understand the game situation.…
Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating…
Routing games are used to to understand the impact of individual users' decisions on network efficiency. Most prior work on routing games uses a simplified model of network flow where all flow exists simultaneously, and users care about…
For sustainable growth and profitability, online game companies are constantly carrying out various events to attract new game users, to maximize return users, and to minimize churn users in online games. Because minimizing churn users is…
This paper considers a wireless network where multiple flows are delivering status updates about their respective information sources. An end user aims to make accurate real-time estimations about the status of each information source using…
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…