Related papers: Card guessing and the birthday problem for samplin…

This paper answers a long-standing open question concerning the $1/e$-strategy for the problem of best choice. $N$ candidates for a job arrive at times independently uniformly distributed in $[0,1]$. The interviewer knows how each candidate…

Cardinality estimation algorithms receive a stream of elements whose order might be arbitrary, with possible repetitions, and return the number of distinct elements. Such algorithms usually seek to minimize the required storage and…

We study a game puzzle that has enjoyed recent popularity among mathematicians, computer scientist, coding theorists and even the mass press. In the game, $n$ players are fitted with randomly assigned colored hats. Individual players can…

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…

We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of…

The Kruskal Count is a card trick invented by Martin J. Kruskal in which a magician "guesses" a card selected by a subject according to a certain counting procedure. With high probability the magician can correctly "guess" the card. The…

`Twenty questions' is a guessing game played by two players: Bob thinks of an integer between $1$ and $n$, and Alice's goal is to recover it using a minimal number of Yes/No questions. Shannon's entropy has a natural interpretation in this…

Magic: the Gathering is a popular and famously complicated card game about magical combat. Recently, several authors including Chatterjee and Ibsen-Jensen (2016) and Churchill, Biderman, and Herrick (2019) have investigated the…

In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…

The Hummer Principle was born from the mind of Bob Hummer in 1946, which consists of performing card shuffles with an even number of cards while leaving some properties of the deck intact. In this document, we will present a generalization…

We introduce and examine the {\em Holiday Gathering Problem} which models the difficulty that couples have when trying to decide with which parents should they spend the holiday. Our goal is to schedule the family gatherings so that the…

For a given number of colors, $s$, the guessing number of a graph is the (base $s$) logarithm of the cardinality of the largest family of colorings of the vertex set of the graph such that the color of each vertex can be determined from the…

Let $G$ be a graph with $n$ vertices. The {\em hat guessing number} of $G$ is defined in terms of the following game: There are $n$ players and one opponent. The opponent will wear one of the $q$ hats of different colors on the player's…

We introduce a variant of Shepp's classical urn problem in which the optimal stopper does not know whether sampling from the urn is done with or without replacement. By considering the problem's continuous-time analog, we provide bounds on…

In this paper, we analyse a misere tree searching game, where players take turns to guess vertices in a tree with a secret `poisoned' vertex. After each turn, the guessed vertex is removed from the tree and the game continues on the…

In trick-taking card games, a two-step process of state sampling and evaluation is widely used to approximate move values. While the evaluation component is vital, the accuracy of move value estimates is also fundamentally linked to how…

The game of best choice (or "secretary problem") is a model for making an irrevocable decision among a fixed number of candidate choices that are presented sequentially in random order, one at a time. Because the classically optimal…

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…

In this expository article, we discuss the rank-derangement problem, which asks for the number of permutations of a deck of cards such that each card is replaced by a card of a different rank. This combinatorial problem arises in computing…

In this paper we examine problems motivated by on-line financial problems and stochastic games. In particular, we consider a sequence of entirely arbitrary distinct values arriving in random order, and must devise strategies for selecting…