Related papers: Big Two and n-card poker probabilities
We are given a stack of pancakes of different sizes and the only allowed operation is to take several pancakes from top and flip them. The unburnt version requires the pancakes to be sorted by their sizes at the end, while in the burnt…
Two-player complete-information game trees are perhaps the simplest possible setting for studying general-sum games and the computational problem of finding equilibria. These games admit a simple bottom-up algorithm for finding subgame…
The usual stochastic order and the likelihood ratio order between probability distributions on the real line are reviewed in full generality. In addition, for the distribution of a random pair $(X,Y)$, it is shown that the conditional…
Sudoku is a famous logic puzzle where the player has to fill a number between 1 and 9 into each empty cell of a $9 \times 9$ grid such that every number appears exactly once in each row, each column, and each $3 \times 3$ block. In 2020,…
The overhand shuffle is one of the ``real'' card shuffling methods in the sense that some people actually use it to mix a deck of cards. A mathematical model was constructed and analyzed by Pemantle [J. Theoret. Probab. 2 (1989) 37--49] who…
Given n=p*q with p and q prim and y in Z_{p*q}^*. Shor's Algorithm computes the order r of y, i.e. y^r=1 (mod n). If r=2k is even and y^k \ne -1 (mod n) we can easily compute a non trivial factor of n: gcd(y^k-1,n). In the original paper it…
In the top to random shuffle, the first a cards are removed from a deck of n cards 12 \cdots n and then inserted back into the deck. This action can be studied by treating the top to random shuffle as an element B_a, which we define…
A well-known chessboard problem is that of placing eight queens on the chessboard so that no two queens are able to attack each other. (Recall that a queen can attack anything on the same row, column, or diagonal as itself.) This problem is…
We consider a Polya urn, started with b black and w white balls, where b>w. We compute the probability that there are ever the same number of black and white balls in the urn, and show that it is twice the probability of getting no more…
We consider the generalized game Lights Out played on a graph and investigate the following question: for a given positive integer $n$, what is the probability that a graph chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
In the theory of voting, the Plurality rule for preferences that come in the form of linear orders selects the alternatives most frequently appearing in the first position of those orders, while the Anti-Plurality rule selects the…
In this paper a way is suggested for calculating the probability of consecutive number strings within a sequence of n numbers randomly drawn (without replacement) among the set of the first N consecutive numbers, with N>>n. An explicit…
What is the average number of tosses needed before a particular sequence of heads and tails turns up? We solve the problem didactically, starting with doubles, finding that a tail, followed by a head, turns up on the average after only four…
Penney's game is a two player zero-sum game in which each player chooses a three-flip pattern of heads and tails and the winner is the player whose pattern occurs first in repeated tosses of a fair coin. Because the players choose…
Research in the area of secure multi-party computation using a deck of playing cards, often called card-based cryptography, started from the introduction of the five-card trick protocol to compute the logical AND function by den Boer in…
We introduce a new type of card shuffle called one-sided transpositions. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric…
In this paper, we consider the possible types of regular maps of order $2^n$, where the order of a regular map is the order of automorphism group of the map. For $n \le 11$, M. Conder classified all regular maps of order $2^n$. It is easy…
In this paper outer, or dual, billiards outside regular polygons are studied; in particular, periodic points for cases of strictly convex "tables" and for regular n-gons with n = 3,4,6,8,12 are discussed. The main results of the paper are:…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…