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In the game of Scrabble, letter tiles are drawn uniformly at random from a bag. The variability of possible draws as the game progresses is a source of variation that makes it more likely for an inferior player to win a head-to-head match…
Elo rating systems measure the approximate skill of each competitor in a game or sport. A competitor's rating increases when they win and decreases when they lose. Increasing one's rating can be difficult work; one must hone their skills…
We analyze record-breaking events in time series of continuous random variables that are subsequently discretized by rounding down to integer multiples of a discretization scale $\Delta>0$. Rounding leads to ties of an existing record,…
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
Alon and Malinovsky recently proved that it takes on average $2.42849\ldots$ rolls of fair six-sided dice until the first time the total sum of all rolls arrives at a prime. Naturally, one may extend the scenario to dice with a different…
Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…
There is a common belief that humans and many animals follow transitive inference (choosing A over C on the basis of knowing that A is better than B and B is better than C). Transitivity seems to be the essence of rational choice. We…
This paper provides an estimate for the handicap effect in the go game, a board game widely played in Asia and other parts of the world. The estimation utilizes a unique handicap assignment rule of the game, where the amount of handicaps…
The random walk with choice is a well known variation to the random walk that first selects a subset of $d$ neighbours nodes and then decides to move to the node which maximizes the value of a certain metric; this metric captures the number…
An $n$-sided die is an $n$-tuple of positive integers. We say that a die $(a_1,\dots,a_n)$ beats a die $(b_1,\dots,b_n)$ if the number of pairs $(i,j)$ such that $a_i>b_j$ is greater than the number of pairs $(i,j)$ such that $a_i<b_j$. We…
The main objective of this paper is to look from the unique point of view at some phenomena arising in different areas of probability theory and mathematical statistics. We will try to understand what is common between classical…
When are all positions of a game numbers? We show that two properties are necessary and sufficient. These properties are consequences of that, in a number, it is not an advantage to be the first player. One of these properties implies the…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
The prospects of Kahneman and Tversky, Mega Million and Powerball lotteries, St. Petersburg paradox, premature profits and growing losses criticized by Livermore are reviewed under an angle of view comparing mathematical expectations with…
The problem of creating a three-sided dice with the probability of it landing on each of its sides being equal to 1/3 has been around for many years. Various approaches have been attempted, but as different authors achieved at different…
Boxing has a long-standing problem with biased judging, impacting both professional and Olympic bouts. "Robberies", where boxers are widely seen as being denied rightful victories, threaten to drive fans and athletes away from the sport. To…
Consider the following probability puzzle: A fair coin is flipped n times. For each HT in the resulting sequence, Bob gets a point, and for each HH Alice gets a point. Who is more likely to win? We provide a proof that Bob wins more often…
Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target…
Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…