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Lionel Levine's hat challenge has $t$ players, each with a (very large, or infinite) stack of hats on their head, each hat independently colored at random black or white. The players are allowed to coordinate before the random colors are…

We consider the problem of estimating the probability of an observed string drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. The key feature of our study is that the length of the observed string is assumed to be of the same order as the size of…

Alice and Bob take turns (with Alice playing first) in declaring numbers from the set $[1,2N]$. If a player declares a number that was previously declared, that player looses and the other player wins. If all numbers are declared without…

We introduce a guessing game, permutation Wordle, in which a guesser attempts to recover a hidden permutation in $S_n$. In each round, the guesser guesses a permutation (using information from previous rounds) and is told which entries of…

We study the generalization of the game Lights Out in which the standard square grid board is replaced by a graph. We examine the probability that, when a graph is chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices and $e$…

Consider the following game between a random player R and a deterministic player D. There is a pile of n elements at the beginning. The rules for playing are as follows: In each turn of R, if the pile contains exactly m elements, R removes…

In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…

We analyze the general version of the classic guessing game Mastermind with $n$ positions and $k$ colors. Since the case $k \le n^{1-\varepsilon}$, $\varepsilon>0$ a constant, is well understood, we concentrate on larger numbers of colors.…

We introduce a game on graphs. By a theorem of Zermelo, each instance of the game on a finite graph is determined. While the general decision problem on which player has a winning strategy in a given instance of the game is unsolved, we…

Mastermind is in essence a search problem in which a string of symbols that is kept secret must be found by sequentially playing strings that use the same alphabet, and using the responses that indicate how close are those other strings to…

Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…

We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…

In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…

For a balanced cardcounting system we study the random variable of the true count after a number of cards are removed from the remaining deck and we prove a close formula for its standard deviation. As expected, the formula shows that the…

The birthday paradox states that there is at least a 50% chance that some two out of twenty-three randomly chosen people will share the same birth date. The calculation for this problem assumes that all birth dates are equally likely. We…

We consider the generalized game Lights Out played on a graph and investigate the following question: for a given positive integer $n$, what is the probability that a graph chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices…

Let P_{n,d,D} denote the graph taken uniformly at random from the set of all labelled planar graphs on {1,2,...,n} with minimum degree at least d(n) and maximum degree at most D(n). We use counting arguments to investigate the probability…

In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…

Motivated by a problem in the theory of randomized search heuristics, we give a very precise analysis for the coupon collector problem where the collector starts with a random set of coupons (chosen uniformly from all sets). We show that…

We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…