Related papers: The Card Guessing Game: A generating function appr…
The following optimal stopping problem is considered. The vertices of a graph $G$ are revealed one by one, in a random order, to a selector. He aims to stop this process at a time $t$ that maximizes the expected number of connected…
Faced with data-driven policies, individuals will manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions. While earlier works cast these manipulations as undesirable gaming, recent works have adopted a more nuanced causal framing in which…
The Card-Cyclic-to-Random shuffle on $n$ cards is defined as follows: at time $t$ remove the card with label $t$ mod $n$ and randomly reinsert it back into the deck. Pinsky introduced this shuffle and asked how many steps are needed to mix…
There are 134,459 distinct initial hands at the video poker game Jacks or Better, taking suit exchangeability into account. A computer program can determine the optimal strategy (i.e., which cards to hold) for each such hand, but a complete…
Poker is in the family of imperfect information games unlike other games such as chess, connect four, etc which are perfect information game instead. While many perfect information games have been solved, no non-trivial imperfect…
We consider a class of Nash games, termed as aggregative games, being played over a networked system. In an aggregative game, a player's objective is a function of the aggregate of all the players' decisions. Every player maintains an…
Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target…
Machine learning relies on the assumption that unseen test instances of a classification problem follow the same distribution as observed training data. However, this principle can break down when machine learning is used to make important…
We present two recursive strategy improvement algorithms for solving simple stochastic games. First we present an algorithm for solving SSGs of degree $d$ that uses at most $O\left(\left\lfloor(d+1)^2/2\right\rfloor^{n/2}\right)$…
A Sudoku puzzle often has a regular pattern in the arrangement of initial digits and it is typically made solvable with known solving techniques, called strategies. In this paper, we consider the problem of generating such Sudoku instances.…
In this article, we look at a hat-guessing game, in which each player must guess the color of their own hat while only seeing the hats of the other players. We focus on the case of two hat colors and a countably infinite number of players.…
In the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds shuffle, a deck of $N$ cards is cut into two approximately equal parts which are then riffled uniformly at random. Bayer and Diaconis famously showed that this Markov chain undergoes cutoff in total variation…
Fighting Fantasy is a popular recreational fantasy gaming system worldwide. Combat in this system progresses through a stochastic game involving a series of rounds, each of which may be won or lost. Each round, a limited resource (`luck')…
We investigate the $k$-cycle shuffle on repeated cards, namely on a deck consisting of $l$ identical copies of each of $m$ card types, with total size $n=ml$. We establish asymptotic results for the total variation mixing of this shuffle,…
Deep Reinforcement Learning combined with Fictitious Play shows impressive results on many benchmark games, most of which are, however, single-stage. In contrast, real-world decision making problems may consist of multiple stages, where the…
We prove a theorem that reduces bounding the mixing time of a card shuffle to verifying a condition that involves only pairs of cards, then we use it to obtain improved bounds for two previously studied models. E. Thorp introduced the…
We present a simple yet powerful and applicable quadrature based scheme for constructing optimal iterative methods. According to the, still unproved, Kung-Traub conjecture an optimal iterative method based on $n+1$ evaluations could achieve…
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
In two-player games on graph, the players construct an infinite path through the game graph and get a reward computed by a payoff function over infinite paths. Over weighted graphs, the typical and most studied payoff functions compute the…
The network coloring game has been proposed in the literature of social sciences as a model for conflict-resolution circumstances. The players of the game are the vertices of a graph with $n$ vertices and maximum degree $\Delta$. The game…