Related papers: The Card Guessing Game: A generating function appr…

We carry out a game-theoretic analysis of the recursive game "Guts," a variant of poker featuring repeated play with possibly growing stakes. An interesting aspect of such games is the need to account for funds lost to all players if…

It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…

By a well-known result of Bayer and Diaconis, the maximum entropy model of the common riffle shuffle implies that the number of riffle shuffles necessary to mix a standard deck of 52 cards is either 7 or 11--with the former number applying…

Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…

A defining feature of collectable card games is the deck building process prior to actual gameplay, in which players form their decks according to some restrictions. Learning to build decks is difficult for players and models alike due to…

We calculated a fixed strategy that minimizes the average number of guesses (minimum strategy) for the number-guessing game MOO by exhaustive search. Although the minimum strategy for a similar game, mastermind, has been reported, this…

Consider a well-shuffled deck of cards of $n$ different types where each type occurs $m$ times. In a complete feedback game, a player is asked to guess the top card from the deck. After each guess, the top card is revealed to the player and…

In this note, we give an explicit polynomial-time executable strategy for Peter Winkler's hat guessing game that gives superior results if the distribution of hats is imbalanced. While Winkler's strategy guarantees in any case that $\lfloor…

We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…

We study the cutoff phenomenon for generalized riffle shuffles where, at each step, the deck of cards is cut into a random number of packs of multinomial sizes which are then riffled together.

How can we generate a permutation of the numbers $1$ through $n$ so that it is hard to guess the next element given the history so far? The twist is that the generator of the permutation (the ``Dealer") has limited memory, while the…

In this paper, we study some cards shuffles which are used by magicians. We focus ourselves on the possibility to hit eventually the initial state after several shuffles. This is a classical problem arising in discrete dynamical systems.…

For positive integers $k$ and $n$, the shuffle group $G_{k,kn}$ is generated by the $k!$ permutations of a deck of $kn$ cards performed by cutting the deck into $k$ piles with $n$ cards in each pile, and then perfectly interleaving these…

In 2019, Butler, Choi, Kim, and Seo introduced a new type of juggling card that represents multiplex juggling patterns in a natural bijective way. They conjectured a formula for the generating function for the number of multiplex juggling…

The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…

Standard perfect shuffles involve splitting a deck of $2n$ cards into two stacks and interlacing the cards from the stacks. There are two ways that this interlacing can be done, commonly referred to as an in shuffle and an out shuffle,…

We consider new types of perfect shuffles wherein a deck is split in half, one half of the deck is "reversed", and then the cards are interlaced. Flip shuffles are when the reversal comes from flipping the half over so that we also need to…

We consider a two-player game in which the first player (the Guesser) tries to guess, edge-by-edge, the path that second player (the Chooser) takes through a directed graph. At each step, the Guesser makes a wager as to the correctness of…

Divide a deck of $kn$ cards into $k$ equal piles and place them from left to right. The standard shuffle $\sigma$ is performed by picking up the top cards one by one from left to right and repeating until all cards have been picked up. For…

Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…