Related papers: Optimum Strategies for the Game Super Six
"The chance to win given a certain move" is an easily obtainable quantity from data and often quoted in gaming statistics. It is also the fundamental quantity that reinforcement learning AI bases on. Unfortunately, this conditional…
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
We analyze what happens to the average duration of a game of Chutes and Ladders as the probability of rolling $\delta \in \{ 1,2,3,4,5,6\}$ approaches 100%. We utilize Markov models, and Monte Carlo simulations in Python. We also introduce…
The semigroup game is a two-person zero-sum game defined on a semigroup S as follows: Players 1 and 2 choose elements x and y in S, respectively, and player 1 receives a payoff f(xy) defined by a function f from S to [-1,1]. If the…
When facing a heavily-favored opponent, an underdog must be willing to assume greater-than-average risk. In statistical language, one would say that an underdog must be willing to adopt a strategy whose outcome has a larger-than-average…
The Game of Poker Chips, Dominoes and Survival fosters team building and high level cooperation in large groups, and is a tool applied in management training exercises. Each player, initially given two colored poker chips, is allowed to…
In this paper we present a novel approach to optimise tactical and strategic decision making in football (soccer). We model the game of football as a multi-stage game which is made up from a Bayesian game to model the pre-match decisions…
Given two players alternately picking pieces of a pizza sliced by radial cuts, in such a way that after the first piece is taken every subsequent chosen piece is adjacent to some previously taken piece, we provide a strategy for the…
In a strong game played on the edge set of a graph G there are two players, Red and Blue, alternating turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of G (with Red playing first). The winner is the first one to claim all the edges of some…
Stochastic games are often used to model reactive processes. We consider the problem of synthesizing an optimal almost-sure winning strategy in a two-player (namely a system and its environment) turn-based stochastic game with both a…
The game of Antonim is a variant of the game Nim, with the additional rule that heaps are not allowed to be the same size. A winning strategy for three heap Antonim has been solved. We will discuss the solution to three-heap Antonim and…
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…
You play the following game: you start out with $n$ coins that all have probability $p$ to land heads. You toss all of them and you then need to set aside at least one of them, which will not be tossed again. Now you repeat the process with…
We consider two-player games over graphs and give tight bounds on the memory size of strategies ensuring safety objectives. More specifically, we show that the minimal number of memory states of a strategy ensuring a safety objective is…
In numerous positional games the identity of the winner is easily determined. In this case one of the more interesting questions is not {\em who} wins but rather {\em how fast} can one win. These type of problems were studied earlier for…
We consider multi-player stopping games in continuous time. Unlike Dynkin games, in our games the payoff of each player is revealed after all the players stop. Moreover, each player can adjust her own stopping strategy by observing other…
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…
Subset take-away is a two-player game involving a fixed finite set A. Players alternate choosing a proper, non-empty subset of A, with the condition that one may not name a set containing a set that was named earlier. A player unable to…
We study the optimal stopping problem of maximizing the variance of an unkilled linear diffusion. Especially, we demonstrate how the problem can be solved as a convex two-player zero-sum game, and reveal quite surprising application of game…
We focus on the problem of finding an optimal strategy for a team of two players that faces an opponent in an imperfect-information zero-sum extensive-form game. Team members are not allowed to communicate during play but can coordinate…