Related papers: SURPRISE! and When to Schedule It
Recommender systems aim to fulfill the user's daily demands. While most existing research focuses on maximizing the user's engagement with the system, it has recently been pointed out that how frequently the users come back for the service…
We consider two-person sports where each rally is initiated by a \emph{server}, the other player (the \emph{receiver}) becoming the server when he/she wins a rally. Historically, these sports used a scoring based on the \emph{side-out…
The Quality of Experience (QoE) is the users satisfaction while streaming a video session over an over-the-top (OTT) platform like YouTube. QoE of YouTube reflects the smooth streaming session without any buffering and quality shift events.…
We consider a model of oligopolistic competition in a market with search frictions, in which competing firms with products of unknown quality advertise how much information a consumer's visit will glean. In the unique symmetric equilibrium…
Reasoning is most powerful when an LLM accurately aggregates relevant information. We examine the critical role of information aggregation in reasoning by requiring the LLM to analyze sports narratives. To succeed at this task, an LLM must…
Competitive online games use rating systems for matchmaking; progression-based algorithms that estimate the skill level of players with interpretable ratings in terms of the outcome of the games they played. However, the overall experience…
Event data are prevalent in diverse domains such as financial trading, business workflows and industrial IoT nowadays. An event is often characterized by several attributes denoting the meaning associated with the corresponding occurrence…
Video games and the playing thereof have been a fixture of American culture since their introduction in the arcades of the 1980s. However, it was not until the recent proliferation of broadband connections robust and fast enough to handle…
In fantasy sports, strategic thinking-not mere luck-often defines who wins and who falls short. As fantasy cricket grows in popularity across India, understanding whether success stems from skill or chance has become both an analytical and…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
Suspense is a crucial ingredient of narrative fiction, engaging readers and making stories compelling. While there is a vast theoretical literature on suspense, it is computationally not well understood. We compare two ways for modelling…
Knowledge about outcomes is critical for complex event understanding but is hard to acquire. We show that by pre-identifying a participant in a complex event, crowd workers are able to (1) infer the collective impact of salient events that…
Esports have become major international sports with hundreds of millions of spectators. Esports games generate massive amounts of telemetry data. Using these to predict the outcome of esports matches has received considerable attention, but…
This work is concerned with the rating of players/teams in face-to-face games with three possible outcomes: loss, win, and draw. This is one of the fundamental problems in sport analytics, where the very simple and popular, non-trivial…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
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…
This work investigates the role of uncertainty in Slay the Spire using an information-theoretic framework. Focusing on the entropy of game paths (which are based on procedurally-generated maps) we analyze how randomness influences player…
In a prediction tournament, contestants "forecast" by asserting a numerical probability for each of (say) 100 future real-world events. The scoring system is designed so that (regardless of the unknown true probabilities) more accurate…
We introduce LLM CHESS, an evaluation framework designed to probe the generalization of reasoning and instruction-following abilities in large language models (LLMs) through extended agentic interaction in the domain of chess. We rank over…
We reconsider the persistence of information under the dynamics of the logistic map in order to discuss communication through a nonlinear channel where the sender can set the initial state of the system with finite resolution, and the…