Related papers: Aspects of Muchnik's paradox in restricted betting
We study the problem of whether a betting-strategy can be decomposed into an equivalent set of simpler betting-strategies, such as betting-strategies that bet on a restricted set of stages or bet on a restricted of favorable outcomes. We…
Suppose that the outcomes of a roulette table are not entirely random, in the sense that there exists a successful betting strategy. Is there a successful `separable' strategy, in the sense that it does not use the winnings from betting on…
That there exist two losing games that can be combined, either by random mixture or by nonrandom alternation, to form a winning game is known as Parrondo's paradox. We establish a strong law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for…
We introduce the sequence-set betting game, a generalization of An. A. Muchnik's non-monotonic betting game. Instead of successively partitioning the infinite binary strings by their value of a bit at a chosen position, as in the…
Betting strategies are often expressed formally as martingales. A martingale is called integer-valued if each bet must be an integer value. Integer-valued strategies correspond to the fact that in most betting situations, there is a minimum…
The Parrondo's paradox is a counterintuitive phenomenon where individually-losing strategies can be combined in producing a winning expectation. In this paper, the issues surrounding the Parrondo's paradox are investigated. The focus is…
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…
Although mixed extensions of finite games always admit equilibria, this is not the case for countable games, the best-known example being Wald's pick-the-larger-integer game. Several authors have provided conditions for the existence of…
Can a probabilistic gambler get arbitrarily rich when all deterministic gamblers fail? We study this problem in the context of algorithmic randomness, introducing a new notion -- almost everywhere computable randomness. A binary sequence…
Parrondo's paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version…
We show that a pair of Kolmogorov-Loveland betting strategies cannot win on every non-Martin-L\"of random sequence if either of the two following conditions is true: (I) There is an unbounded computable function $g$ such that both betting…
We consider multi-dimensional payoff functions in partially observable Markov decision processes. We study the structure of the set of expected payoff vectors of all strategies (policies) and study what kind are needed to achieve a given…
We study countably infinite MDPs with parity objectives. Unlike in finite MDPs, optimal strategies need not exist, and may require infinite memory if they do. We provide a complete picture of the exact strategy complexity of…
Quantum entanglement is known to provide a strong advantage in many two-party distributed tasks. We investigate the question of how much entanglement is needed to reach optimal performance. For the first time we show that there exists a…
We study the extent to which it is possible to approximate the optimal value of a Unique Games instance in Fixed-Point Logic with Counting (FPC). Formally, we prove lower bounds against the accuracy of FPC-interpretations that map Unique…
This paper presents a new lower bound for the discrete strategy improvement algorithm for solving parity games due to Voege and Jurdziski. First, we informally show which structures are difficult to solve for the algorithm. Second, we…
Real-life agents seldom have unlimited reasoning power. In this paper, we propose and study a new formal notion of computationally bounded strategic ability in multi-agent systems. The notion characterizes the ability of a set of agents to…
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…
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 construct games of chance from simpler games of chance. We show that it may happen that the simpler games of chance are fair or unfavourable to a player andyet the new combined game is favourable -- this is a counter-intuitive…