Related papers: Physical Zero-Knowledge Proof for Ball Sort Puzzle
We analyze Solo Chess puzzles, where the input is an $n \times n$ board containing some standard Chess pieces of the same color, and the goal is to make a sequence of capture moves to reduce down to a single piece. Prior work analyzes this…
In this paper, we provide a probabilistic analysis of the confidentiality in a card-based protocol. We focus on Bert den Boer's original Five Card Trick to develop our approach. Five Card Trick was formulated as a secure two-party…
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
We prove a lower and an upper bound on the number of block moves necessary to sort a permutation. We put our results in contrast with existing results on sorting by block transpositions, and raise some open questions.
Have you ever played or watched a game of pool? If so, you have already seen a billiard system in action. In mathematics and physics, a billiard system describes a ball that moves in straight lines and bounces off walls. Despite these…
The main challenge of combinatorial game theory is to handle combinatorial chaos, if one player knows the strategy better than his opponent, he is able to determine the exact results of a game. If both players are qualified competitor, the…
Several variations of hat guessing games have been popularly discussed in recreational mathematics. In a typical hat guessing game, after initially coordinating a strategy, each of $n$ players is assigned a hat from a given color set.…
Balls-and-bins games have been a wildly successful tool for modeling load balancing problems. In this paper, we study a new scenario, which we call the ball recycling game, defined as follows: Throw m balls into n bins i.i.d. according to a…
Two-player zero-sum "graph games" are a central model, which proceeds as follows. A token is placed on a vertex of a graph, and the two players move it to produce an infinite "play", which determines the winner or payoff of the game.…
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…
In this paper we introduce polytopal stochastic games, an extension of two-player, zero-sum, turn-based stochastic games, in which we may have uncertainty over the transition probabilities. In these games the uncertainty over the…
Zero-knowledge proofs allow verification of computations without revealing private information. However, existing systems require memory proportional to the computation size, which has historically limited use in large-scale applications…
A box-ball system is a discrete dynamical system whose dynamics come from the balls jumping according to certain rules. A permutation on n objects gives a box-ball system state by assigning its one-line notation to n consecutive boxes.…
We consider the following card guessing game with no feedback. An ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards. One after…
This paper proposes \emph{knowledge-based paraonoia search} (KBPS) to find forced wins during trick-taking in the card game Skat; for some one of the most interesting card games for three players. It combines efficient partial information…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
We consider a card guessing strategy for a stack of cards with two different types of cards, say $m_1$ cards of type red (heart or diamond) and $m_2$ cards of type black (clubs or spades). Given a deck of $M=m_1+m_2$ cards, we propose a…
The Decodoku project seeks to let users get hands-on with cutting-edge quantum research through a set of simple puzzle games. The design of these games is explicitly based on the problem of decoding qudit variants of surface codes. This…
In this paper, we use techniques of enumerative combinatorics to study the following problem: we count the number of ways to split $n$ balls into nonempty, ordered bins so that the most crowded bin has exactly $k$ balls. We find closed…
Partially-ordered set games, also called poset games, are a class of two-player combinatorial games. The playing field consists of a set of elements, some of which are greater than other elements. Two players take turns removing an element…