Related papers: The Card Guessing Game: A generating function appr…
We analyze the mixing time of a popular shuffling machine known as the shelf shuffler. It is a modified version of a $2m$-handed riffle shuffle ($m=10$ in casinos) in which a deck of $n$ cards is split multinomially into $2m$ piles, the…
We study a variation of the game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem or game of googol) under an additional assumption that the ranks of interview candidates are restricted using permutation pattern-avoidance. We describe…
In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…
Deck building is a crucial component in playing Collectible Card Games (CCGs). The goal of deck building is to choose a fixed-sized subset of cards from a large card pool, so that they work well together in-game against specific opponents.…
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…
Stationary memoryless sources produce two correlated random sequences $X^n$ and $Y^n$. A guesser seeks to recover $X^n$ in two stages, by first guessing $Y^n$ and then $X^n$. The contributions of this work are twofold: (1) We characterize…
The $k$-cap (or $k$-winners-take-all) process on a graph works as follows: in each iteration, exactly $k$ vertices of the graph are in the cap (i.e., winners); the next round winners are the vertices that have the highest total degree to…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
Synthesis of bulletproof strategies in imperfect information scenarios is a notoriously hard problem. In this paper, we suggest that it is sometimes a viable alternative to aim at "reasonably good" strategies instead. This makes sense not…
A mean-field game (MFG) seeks the Nash Equilibrium of a game involving a continuum of players, where the Nash Equilibrium corresponds to a fixed point of the best-response mapping. However, simple fixed-point iterations do not always…
In this paper, we consider the problem of guessing a sequence subject to a distortion constraint. Specifically, we assume the following game between Alice and Bob: Alice has a sequence $\bx$ of length $n$. Bob wishes to guess $\bx$, yet he…
We introduce a new type of card shuffle called one-sided transpositions. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric…
In the past three decades, deductive games have become interesting from the algorithmic point of view. Deductive games are two players zero sum games of imperfect information. The first player, called "codemaker", chooses a secret code and…
Inspired by the increasing popularity of Swiss-system tournaments in sports, we study the problem of predetermining the number of rounds that can be guaranteed in a Swiss-system tournament. Matches of these tournaments are usually…
Given a graph G with n vertices and k players, each of which is placing a facility on one of the vertices of G, we define the score of the i'th player to be the number of vertices for which, among all players, the facility placed by the…
A partially parallel dynamical noisy binary choice (Ising) game in discrete time of $N$ players on complete graphs with $k$ players having a possibility of changing their strategies at each time moment called $k$-flip Ising game is…
This paper investigates a class of multi-player discrete games where each player aims to maximize its own utility function. Each player does not know the other players' action sets, their deployed actions or the structures of its own or the…
We focus on the problem of finding an optimal strategy for a team of two players that faces an opponent in an imperfect-information zero-sum extensive-form game. Team members are not allowed to communicate during play but can coordinate…
We study concurrent stochastic reachability games played on finite graphs. Two players, Max and Min, seek respectively to maximize and minimize the probability of reaching a set of target states. We prove that Max has a memoryless strategy…
Blackjack or "21" is a popular card-based game of chance and skill. The objective of the game is to win by obtaining a hand total higher than the dealer's without exceeding 21. The ideal blackjack strategy will maximize financial return in…