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In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
We consider perfect-information reachability stochastic games for 2 players on infinite graphs. We identify a subclass of such games, and prove two interesting properties of it: first, Player Max always has optimal strategies in games from…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
We explain a highly efficient algorithm for playing the simplest type of dots and boxes endgame optimally (by which we mean "in such a way so as to maximise the number of boxes that you take"). The algorithm is sufficiently simple that it…
We study the two-player safe game of Competitive Diffusion, a game-theoretic model for the diffusion of technologies or influence through a social network. In game theory, safe strategies are mixed strategies with a minimal expected gain…
In games with a large number of players where players may have overlapping objectives, the analysis of stable outcomes typically depends on player types. A special case is when a large part of the player population consists of imitation…
Consider concurrent, infinite duration, two-player win/lose games played on graphs. If the winning condition satisfies some simple requirement, the existence of Player 1 winning (finite-memory) strategies is equivalent to the existence of…
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.…
We give a simple human-playable winning strategy for the second player in the game of Sim.
We study the parallel Minority Game, where a group of agents, each having two choices, try to independently decide on a strategy such that they stay on minority between their own two choices. However, there are multiple such groups of…
We consider an autonomous navigation problem, whereby a traveler aims at traversing an environment in which an adversary tries to set an ambush. A two players zero sum game is introduced. Players' strategies are computed as random path…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
We investigate the adversarial bandit problem with multiple plays under semi-bandit feedback. We introduce a highly efficient algorithm that asymptotically achieves the performance of the best switching $m$-arm strategy with minimax optimal…
Player ONE chooses a meager set and player TWO, a nowhere dense set per inning. They play $\omega$ many innings. ONE's consecutive choices must form a (weakly) increasing sequence. TWO wins if the union of the chosen nowhere dense sets…
This article presents a new three-player version of the bridge playing card game for the purpose of ending fixed partnerships so that the play can be more dynamic and flexible. By dynamically redefining team makeup in real time, this game…
We investigate the probability of scoring a point when playing the basketball shooting game called "Horse". We show that under the Traditional Rules, it is optimal to choose very easy shots. We propose alternative rules called Pops Rules,…
We consider a two-player search game on a tree $T$. One vertex (unknown to the players) is randomly selected as the target. The players alternately guess vertices. If a guess $v$ is not the target, then both players are informed in which…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. A ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards, where one after…