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What is the average number of tosses needed before a particular sequence of heads and tails turns up? We solve the problem didactically, starting with doubles, finding that a tail, followed by a head, turns up on the average after only four…
Bridge is a trick-taking card game requiring the ability to evaluate probabilities since it is a game of incomplete information where each player only sees its cards. In order to choose a strategy, a player needs to gather information about…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
A variety of practical problems can be modeled by the decision-making process in multi-player games where a group of self-interested players aim at optimizing their own local objectives, while the objectives depend on the actions taken by…
We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…
Balancing an ever growing strategic game of high complexity, such as Hearthstone is a complex task. The target of making strategies diverse and customizable results in a delicate intricate system. Tuning over 2000 cards to generate the…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
Consider N cooperative but non-communicating players where each plays one out of M arms for T turns. Players have different utilities for each arm, representable as an NxM matrix. These utilities are unknown to the players. In each turn…
The 13-card variant of Classic Indian Rummy is a sequential game of incomplete information that requires probabilistic reasoning and combinatorial decision-making. This paper proposes a rule-based framework for strategic play, driven by a…
A robot performing multi-object grasping needs to sense the number of objects in the hand after grasping. The count plays an important role in determining the robot's next move and the outcome and efficiency of the whole pick-place process.…
In card games, in casino games with multiple decks of cards and in cryptography, one is sometimes faced with the following problem: how can a human (as opposed to a computer) shuffle a large deck of cards? The procedure we study is to break…
Regret Matching+ (RM+) and its variants are important algorithms for solving large-scale games. However, a theoretical understanding of their success in practice is still a mystery. Moreover, recent advances on fast convergence in games are…
Recent work in reinforcement learning demonstrated that learning solely through self-play is not only possible, but could also result in novel strategies that humans never would have thought of. However, optimization methods cast as a game…
One approach for reducing run time and improving efficiency of machine learning is to reduce the convergence rate of the optimization algorithm used. Shuffling is an algorithm technique that is widely used in machine learning, but it only…
Consider an n by n array of cards shuffled in the following manner. An element x of the array is chosen uniformly at random; Then with probability 1/2 the rectangle of cards above and to the left of x is rotated 180 degrees, and with…
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.…
We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…
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…
The thesis consider the mixing of few (3-4) card shuffling as well as of large (52 card) deck. The thesis is showing the limit on the shuffling to homogeneity elaborated in short program; the thesis is in italian.
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the popular Tic-Tac-Toe game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields," with each field constituting its own miniature tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player must…