Related papers: Optimum Strategies for the Game Super Six
Recent work in reinforcement learning demonstrated that learning solely through self-play is not only possible, but could also result in novel strategies that humans never would have thought of. However, optimization methods cast as a game…
Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…
Several variations of hat guessing games have been popularly discussed in recreational mathematics. In a typical hat guessing game, after initially coordinating a strategy, each of $n$ players is assigned a hat from a given color set.…
Here, we present a variant of the sliding coins game. Two coins are placed on distinct squares of a semi-infinite linear board with squares numbered $0, 1, 2, dots, $. Two players take turns and move a coin to a lower unoccupied square.…
This paper considers the effect of riffle shuffling on decks of cards, allowing for some cards to be indistinguishable from other cards. The dual problem of dealing a game with hands, such as bridge or poker, is also considered. The…
We examine a two-person game we call Will-Testing in which the strategy space for both players is a real number. It has no equilibrium. When an infinitely large set of players plays this in all possible pairings, there is an equilibrium for…
Collapsi is a two-player game of complete information released in June 2025 by Mark S. Ball of Riffle Shuffle & Roll. Played with two pawns on a toroidal board of 16 randomly mixed playing cards, players take it in turns to move based on…
This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…
In the Korean traditional board game Yut-Nori, teams compete by moving their pieces on the two-dimensional game board, and the team whose all pieces complete a round trip on the board wins. In every round, teams throw four wooden sticks of…
We consider two-player stochastic games played on a finite graph for infinitely many rounds. Stochastic games generalize both Markov decision processes (MDP) by adding an adversary player, and two-player deterministic games by adding…
Delay games are two-player games of infinite duration in which one player may delay her moves to obtain a lookahead on her opponent's moves. For $\omega$-regular winning conditions it is known that such games can be solved in…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
Consider a two-person zero-sum search game between a hider and a searcher. The hider hides among $n$ discrete locations, and the searcher successively visits individual locations until finding the hider. Known to both players, a search at…
We present and analyze PackIt!, a turn-based game consisting of packing rectangles on an $n \times n$ grid. PackIt! can be easily played on paper, either as a competitive two-player game or in \emph{solitaire} fashion. On the $t$-th turn, a…
When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…
Given integer $n$ and $k$ such that $0 < k \leq n$ and $n$ piles of stones, two player alternate turns. By one move it is allowed to choose any $k$ piles and remove exactly one stone from each. The player who has to move but cannot is the…
In the game of Scrabble, letter tiles are drawn uniformly at random from a bag. The variability of possible draws as the game progresses is a source of variation that makes it more likely for an inferior player to win a head-to-head match…
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…
In this paper we introduce novel algorithmic strategies for effciently playing two-player games in which the players have different or identical player roles. In the case of identical roles, the players compete for the same objective (that…