Related papers: Card guessing and the birthday problem for samplin…
The problem of guessing subject to distortion is considered, and the performance of randomized guessing strategies is investigated. A one-shot achievability bound on the guessing moment (i.e., moment of the number of required queries) is…
Recently Wilson [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 274--325] introduced an important new technique for lower bounding the mixing time of a Markov chain. In this paper we extend Wilson's technique to find lower bounds of the correct order for…
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…
The ``overlapping-cycles shuffle'' mixes a deck of $n$ cards by moving either the $n$th card or the $(n-k)$th card to the top of the deck, with probability half each. We determine the spectral gap for the location of a single card, which,…
Several sages wearing colored hats occupy the vertices of a graph. Each sage tries to guess the color of his own hat merely on the basis of observing the hats of his neighbours without exchanging any information. Each hat can have one of…
We consider the problem of choosing the best of $n$ samples, out of a large random pool, when the sampling of each member is associated with a certain cost. The quality (worth) of the best sample clearly increases with $n$, but so do the…
In the gift exchange game there are n players and n wrapped gifts. When a player's number is called, that person can either choose one of the remaining wrapped gifts, or can "steal" a gift from someone who has already unwrapped it, subject…
The aim of this paper is to solve the "gift exchange" problem: you are one of n players, and there are n wrapped gifts on display; when your turn comes, you can either choose any of the remaining wrapped gifts, or you can "steal" a gift…
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,…
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…
A random $n$-permutation may be generated by sequentially removing random cards $C_1,...,C_n$ from an $n$-card deck $D = \{1,...,n\}$. The permutation $\sigma$ is simply the sequence of cards in the order they are removed. This permutation…
We consider the following one-player game called Dundee. We are given a deck consisting of s_i cards of Value i, where i=1,...,v, and an integer m\le s_1+...+s_v. There are m rounds. In each round, the player names a number between 1 and v…
We initiate the study of the hat guessing number of a graph where the adversary is only allowed to provide a proper coloring of the graph. This is the largest number $q$ for which there is a guessing strategy on each vertex that only…
We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…
We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the optimal strategy. The exact blackjack…
Birthday problem is a well-known classic problem in probability theory widely applied in cryptography, and bubble sort is a popular sorting algorithm leading to some interesting theoretical problems in computer science. However, the…
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…
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.…
Various card tricks involve under-down dealing, where alternatively one card is placed under the deck and the next card is dealt. We study how the cards need to be prepared in the deck to be dealt in order. The order in which the $N$ cards…