Related papers: Optimal Strategies and Rules for the Game of Horse
For gambling on horses, a one-parameter family of utility functions is proposed, which contains Kelly's logarithmic criterion and the expected-return criterion as special cases. The strategies that maximize the utility function are derived,…
Simple stochastic games are two-player zero-sum stochastic games with turn-based moves, perfect information, and reachability winning conditions. We present two new algorithms computing the values of simple stochastic games. Both of them…
Every interaction of a living organism with its environment involves the placement of a bet. Armed with partial knowledge about a stochastic world, the organism must decide its next step or near-term strategy, an act that implicitly or…
Matrix games constitute a fundamental problem of game theory and describe a situation of two players with completely conflicting interests. We show how methods from statistical mechanics can be used to investigate the statistical properties…
Motivated by a problem posed by Aldous, our goal is to find the maximal-entropy win-martingale: In a sports game between two teams, the chance the home team wins is initially $x_0 \in (0,1)$ and finally 0 or 1. As an idealization we take a…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
Two players alternate tossing a biased coin where the probability of getting heads is p. The current player is awarded alpha points for tails and alpha+beta for heads. The first player reaching n points wins. For a completely unfair coin…
A common format for sports contests involves pairwise matches between two teams, with the #1 player of team A matched against the #1 player of team B, the #2 player of team A against the #2 player of team B, and so on. This paper addresses…
Poset games are a class of combinatorial game that remain unsolved. Soltys and Wilson proved that computing wining strategies is in \textbf{PSPACE} and aside from special cases such as Nim and N-Free games, \textbf{P} time algorithms for…
Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…
We present a Spades bidding algorithm that is superior to recreational human players and to publicly available bots. Like in Bridge, the game of Spades is composed of two independent phases, \textit{bidding} and \textit{playing}. This paper…
Decision making under uncertainty is a key component of many AI settings, and in particular of voting scenarios where strategic agents are trying to reach a joint decision. The common approach to handle uncertainty is by maximizing expected…
Moves in chess games are usually analyzed on a case-by-case basis by professional players, but thanks to the availability of large game databases, we can envision another approach of the game. Here, we indeed adopt a very different point of…
Value functions are used in sports applications to determine the optimal action players should employ. However, most literature implicitly assumes that the player can perform the prescribed action with known and fixed probability of…
The Pythagorean formula is one of the most popular ways to measure the true ability of a team. It is very easy to use, estimating a team's winning percentage from the runs they score and allow. This data is readily available on standings…
In this paper we model basketball plays as episodes from team-specific non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs) with shot clock dependent transition probabilities. Bayesian hierarchical models are employed in the modeling and…
A question in geometric probability about the location of the balls in a game of bocce leads to related questions about the probability that a system of linear equations has a positive solution and the probability that a random zero-sum…
Fantasy basketball has a rich underlying mathematical structure which makes optimal drafting strategy unclear. A central issue for category leagues is how to aggregate a player's statistics from all categories into a single number…
Kelly's criterion is a betting strategy that maximizes the long term growth rate, but which is known to be risky. Here, we find optimal betting strategies that gives the highest capital growth rate while keeping a certain low value of risky…
Bruss's odds theorem \cite{Bruss1} addresses the problem of determining the optimal stopping time for sequences of independent indicator functions. In this note, we derive upper and lower bounds for the success probability under the optimal…