Related papers: 100 prisoners and a lightbulb -- looking back
The long history of the research concerning the possible existence of bound or resonant states in light multineutron systems, essentially $^3$n and $^4$n, is reviewed. Both the experimental and the theoretical points of view have been…
Recently a certain conceptual puzzle in the AdS/CFT correspondence, concerning the growth of quantum circuit complexity and the wormhole volume, has been identified by Bouland-Fefferman-Vazirani and Susskind. In this note, we propose a…
The Rubik's Cube is the most popular puzzle in the world. Two of its studied aspects are God's Number, the minimum number of turns necessary to solve any state, and the first law of cubology, a solvability criterion. We modify previous…
This review aims to provide a comprehensive update on the progress made on the Sequential Testing problem (STP) in the last 20 years after the review, [1] was published. Many studies have provided new theoretical results, extensions of the…
This article is about the mathematics of ringing the changes. We describe the mathematics which arises from a real-world activity, that of ringing the changes on bells. We present Rankin's solution of one of the famous old problems in the…
This paper studied the change of vigilance based on stimulus coming consecutively using the computerized version of the Mackworth Clock Test run from PsyToolkit website. 7 participants (16.57 +/-1 years old, 2 males), performed 10…
David Gauthier in his article, Maximization constrained: the rationality of cooperation, tries to defend the joint strategy in situations in which no outcome is both equilibrium and optimal. Prisoner Dilemma is the most familiar example of…
Humans and other animals can adapt their social behavior in response to environmental cues including the feedback obtained through experience. Nevertheless, the effects of the experience-based learning of players in evolution and…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
We study population dynamics under which each revising agent tests each strategy k times, with each trial being against a newly drawn opponent, and chooses the strategy whose mean payoff was highest. When k = 1, defection is globally stable…
The standard iterated prisoner's dilemma is an unrealistic model of social behaviour because it forces individuals to participate in the interaction. We analyse a model in which players have the option of ending their association. If the…
One of the most direct human mechanisms of promoting cooperation is rewarding it. We study the effect of sharing a reward among cooperators in the most stringent form of social dilemma, namely the Prisoner's Dilemma. Specifically, for a…
In this article, we present several apparent paradoxes of special relativity and their respective solutions. These paradoxes have appeared since the advent of relativity in 1905, and in fact they are never paradoxes. From a didactic point…
Thirty original and collected problems, puzzles, and paradoxes in mathematics and physics are explained in this paper, taught by the author to the elementary and high school teachers at the University of New Mexico - Gallup in 1997-8 and…
The Prisoners' Dilemma is perhaps the most famous model in the field of game theory. Consequently, it is natural to investigate its quantum version when one considers to apply quantum strategies to game theory. There are two main results in…
In this piece, we examine one variant of the infamous 15 Tile Puzzle and develop a mathematical backing behind why it is unsolvable. Using concepts of permutations, bijectivity, and cycle transpositions, we not only prove how to model this…
Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is…
In this work, we study a triangular variant of the Lights Out game, proposed in the 2025 Capixaba Mathematics Olympiad. We present a combinatorial description of the game, formally characterize its operations, and introduce the notion of a…
The Prisoner's Dilemma, zero-sum games, LQR team problems, and differential games have shaped game theory in controls for decades, but the field's most pressing adversarial challenges demand a richer framework, and its name is Colonel…
This paper first describes, from a high level viewpoint, the main challenges that had to be solved in order to develop a theory of spin glasses in the last fifty years. It then explains how important inference problems, notably those…