Related papers: On the distribution of winners' scores in a round-…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…
We study the equilibrium distribution of relative strategy scores of agents in the asymmetric phase ($\alpha\equiv P/N\gtrsim 1$) of the basic Minority Game using sign-payoff, with $N$ agents holding two strategies over $P$ histories. We…
Boxing has a long-standing problem with biased judging, impacting both professional and Olympic bouts. "Robberies", where boxers are widely seen as being denied rightful victories, threaten to drive fans and athletes away from the sport. To…
The game of Hex has two players who take turns placing stones of their respective colors on the hexagons of a rhombus-shaped hexagonal grid. Black wins by completing a crossing between two opposite edges, while White wins by completing a…
In this note we discuss a theory of combinatorial games that involve transmitting the moves through a noisy channel that can introduce errors during the transmission. Players are aware of this interference and incorporate this variable into…
Quitting games are one of the simplest stochastic games in which at any stage each player has only two possible actions, continue and quit. The game ends as soon as at least one player chooses to quit. The players then receive a payoff,…
Chances of a gambler are always lower than chances of a casino in the case of an ideal, mathematically perfect roulette, if the capital of the gambler is limited and the minimum and maximum allowed bets are limited by the casino. However, a…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
In general, Nash equilibria in normal-form games may require players to play (probabilistically) mixed strategies. We define a measure of the complexity of finite probability distributions and study the complexity required to play Nash…
In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…
We study a distributed allocation process where, repeatedly in time, every player renegotiates past allocations with neighbors and allocates new revenues. The average allocations evolve according to a doubly (over time and space) averaging…
A knockout tournament is one of the most simple and popular forms of competition. Here, we are given a binary tournament tree where all leaves are labeled with seed position names. The players participating in the tournament are assigned to…
The classic Rock-Paper-Scissors game of size 3 and its extension, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, are modeled by directed graphs called tournaments. They can be further extended to any odd size. The extended games are regular tournaments…
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…
This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
In set theory without the axiom of regularity, we consider a game in which two players choose in turn an element of a given set, an element of this element, etc.; a player wins if its adversary cannot make any next move. Sets that are…
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…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…