Related papers: The Swiss Gambit
Suppose some cleverness score parameter is sufficiently interesting to be defined and then measured, perhaps for different strata of specialists or for the broader population. Such phenomena could have Gaussian distributions, when it comes…
Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…
While many theoretical studies have revealed the strategies that could lead to and maintain cooperation in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, less is known about what human participants actually do in this game and how strategies change when…
Scoring rules aggregate individual rankings by assigning some points to each position in each ranking such that the total sum of points provides the overall ranking of the alternatives. They are widely used in sports competitions consisting…
A single-elimination (SE) tournament is a popular way to select a winner in both sports competitions and in elections. A natural and well-studied question is the tournament fixing problem (TFP): given the set of all pairwise match outcomes,…
In imperfect information games, the game state is generally not fully observable to players. Therefore, good gameplay requires policies that deal with the different information that is hidden from each player. To combat this, effective…
This study presents a rigorous mathematical approach to the optimization of round and betting policies in Blackjack, using Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and Expected Utility Theory. The analysis considers a direct confrontation between a…
How do different alliance mechanisms compare? In this work, we analyze various methods of forming an alliance in the Coalitional General Lotto game, a simple model of competitive resource allocation. In the game, Players 1 and 2…
Winning sets of Schmidt's game enjoy a remarkable rigidity. Therefore, this game (and modifications of it) have been applied to many examples of complete metric spaces (X, d) to show that the set of "badly approximable points", with respect…
The study aims to compare different designs for the World Men's Handball Championships. This event, organised in every two years, has adopted four hybrid formats consisting of knockout and round-robin stages in recent decades, including a…
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…
Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating…
A cooperative player invests effort into a common venture without knowing the partner's intention in advance. But this strategy can be implemented in various ways when a player is involved in different games simultaneously. Interestingly,…
We study a sequential decision-making model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least…
In this paper we demonstrate how genetic algorithms can be used to reverse engineer an evaluation function's parameters for computer chess. Our results show that using an appropriate expert (or mentor), we can evolve a program that is on…
A \emph{fair competition}, based on the concept of envy-freeness, is a non-eliminating competition where each contestant (team or individual player) may not play against all other contestants, but the total difficulty for each contestant is…
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…
This paper coins the notion of Joker games, a variant of concurrent games where the players are not strictly adversarial. Instead, Player 1 can get help from Player 2 by playing a Joker move. We formalize these games as cost games and…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
A tournament has Schuttes property $S_k$ if for every set of $k$ vertices, there is a vertex which dominates the set. In 1963, Erdos provided bounds for $f(k)$, the smallest order of an $S_k$ tournament. Schuttes property has various…