Related papers: Exact Solution to the Chow-Robbins Game for almost…

Have you ever taken a disputed decision by tossing a coin and checking its landing side? This ancestral "heads or tails" practice is still widely used when facing undecided alternatives since it relies on the intuitive fairness of…

We present a quantum algorithm that has rigorous runtime guarantees for several families of binary optimization problems, including Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO), Ising spin glasses ($p$-spin model), and $k$-local…

We consider Gillette's two-person zero-sum stochastic games with perfect information. For each $k \in \ZZ_+$ we introduce an effective reward function, called $k$-total. For $k = 0$ and $1$ this function is known as {\it mean payoff} and…

For a game with positive expectation and some negative profit, a unique price exists, at which the optimal proportion of investment reaches its maximum. For a game with parallel translated profit, the ratio of this price to its expectation…

We study the problem of learning a most biased coin among a set of coins by tossing the coins adaptively. The goal is to minimize the number of tosses until we identify a coin i* whose posterior probability of being most biased is at least…

We study a coin-tossing model used by a ratings agency to justify the sale of constant proportion debt obligations (CPDOs), and prove that it was impossible for CPDOs to achieve in a finite lifetime the Cash-In event of doubling its…

This paper deals with the application of Approximation Theory type techniques to study a classical problem in Probability: estimating the parameter of a biased coin. For this purpose, a Minimax Estimation problem is considered and the…

Robbins' problem of optimal stopping asks one to minimise the expected {\it rank} of observation chosen by some nonanticipating stopping rule. We settle a conjecture regarding the {\it value} of the stopped variable under the rule optimal…

In 2024, Daniel Litt posed a simple coinflip game pitting Alice's "Heads-Heads" vs Bob's "Heads-Tails": who is more likely to win if they score 1 point per occurrence of their substring in a sequence of n fair coinflips? This attracted over…

We consider the cop-throttling number of a graph $G$ for the game of Cops and Robbers, which is defined to be the minimum of $(k + \text{capt}_k(G))$, where $k$ is the number of cops and $\text{capt}_k(G)$ is the minimum number of rounds…

Real numbers from the interval [0, 1] are randomly selected with uniform distribution. There are $n$ of them and they are revealed one by one. However, we do not know their values but only their relative ranks. We want to stop on recently…

Let $X$ be an $n$-element point set in the $k$-dimensional unit cube $[0,1]^k$ where $k \geq 2$. According to an old result of Bollob\'as and Meir (1992), there exists a cycle (tour) $x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n$ through the $n$ points, such that…

Knapsack is one of the most fundamental problems in theoretical computer science. In the $(1 - \epsilon)$-approximation setting, although there is a fine-grained lower bound of $(n + 1 / \epsilon) ^ {2 - o(1)}$ based on the $(\min,…

We introduce the game of Cops and Eternal Robbers played on graphs, where there are infinitely many robbers that appear sequentially over distinct plays of the game. A positive integer $t$ is fixed, and the cops are required to capture the…

We develop value iteration-based algorithms to solve in a unified manner different classes of combinatorial zero-sum games with mean-payoff type rewards. These algorithms rely on an oracle, evaluating the dynamic programming operator up to…

We provide an algorithm to find the value and an optimal strategy of the solitaire variant of the Ten Thousand dice game in the framework of Markov Control Processes. Once an optimal critical threshold is found, the set of non-stopping…

A Dynkin game is considered for stochastic differential equations with random coefficients. We first apply Qiu and Tang's maximum principle for backward stochastic partial differential equations to generalize Krylov estimate for the…

Parrondo's paradox was introduced by Juan Parrondo in 1996. In game theory, this paradox is described as: A combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy. At first glance, this paradox is quite surprising, but we can easily…

We consider a Cops-and-Robber game played on the subsets of an $n$-set. The robber starts at the full set; the cops start at the empty set. On each turn, the robber moves down one level by discarding an element, and each cop moves up one…

For many protocols, quantum strategies have advantages compared with their classical counter-partners, and these advantages have attracted many interests and applications. One of the famous examples is the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH)…