Related papers: Billiards, Checkers, and Quadratic Reciprocity
We provide several positive and negative complexity results for solving games with imperfect recall. Using a one-to-one correspondence between these games on one side and multivariate polynomials on the other side, we show that solving…
While many dynamical systems of mechanical origin, in particular billiards, are strongly chaotic -- enjoy exponential mixing, the rates of mixing in many other models are slow (algebraic, or polynomial). The dynamics in the latter are…
The classical inner and outer billiards can be formulated in variational terms, with length and area as the respective generating functions. The other two combinations, ``inner with area'' and ``outer with length,'' are more recently…
We study the classical motion in bidimensional polygonal billiards on the sphere. In particular we investigate the dynamics in tiling and generic rational and irrational equilateral triangles. Unlike the plane or the negative curvature…
We discuss various experiments on the time decay of velocity autocorrelation functions in billiards. We perform new experiments and find results which are compatible with an exponential mixing hypothesis, first put forward by [FM]: they do…
The classical dynamics of the isotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator confined by an elliptic hard wall is discussed. The interplay between the harmonic potential with circular symmetry and the boundary with elliptical symmetry does…
We investigate chaotic scattering on an attractive step potential with a quadrupolar deformation. The phase space features of the bound billiard are studied by using the notion of symmetry lines to find periodic orbits. We show that the…
Infinitely repeated games support equilibrium concepts beyond those present in one-shot games (e.g., cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma). Nonetheless, repeated games fail to capture our real-world intuition for settings with many…
We give a beautiful explicit example of a convex plane curve such that the outer billiard has a given finite number of invariant curves. Moreover, the dynamics on these curves is a standard shift. This example can be considered as an outer…
We offer some theorems, mainly of finiteness, for certain patterns in elliptical billiards, related to periodic trajectories. For instance, if two players hit a ball at a given position and with directions forming a fixed angle in…
We study the thermal rectification phenomenon in ``billiard'' systems with interacting particles. This interaction induces a local dynamical response of the billiard to an external thermodynamic gradient. To explain this dynamical effect we…
We introduce a new family of billiards which break time reversal symmetry in spite of having piece-wise straight trajectories. We show that our billiards preserve the ergodic and mixing properties of conventional billiards while they may…
We study outer billiard systems around a class of circular sectors. For semi-discs, we prove the existence of elliptic islands occupying a positive proportion of the plane. Combined with known results, this shows the coexistence of…
We construct semi-infinite billiard domains which reverse the direction of most incoming particles. We prove that almost all particles will leave the open billiard domain after a finite number of reflections. Moreover, with high probability…
We consider a random billiard map, the one in which the standard specular reflection rule is replaced by a random reflection given by a Markov operator. We exhibit an invariant measure for random billiards on general tables. In the special…
A system of two masses connected with a weightless rod (called dumbbell in this paper) interacting with a flat boundary is considered. The sharp bound on the number of collisions with the boundary is found using billiard techniques. In…
Billiard systems, broadly speaking, may be regarded as models of mechanical systems in which rigid parts interact through elastic impulsive (collision) forces. When it is desired or necessary to account for linear/angular momentum exchange…
We introduce a new dynamical system that we call "tiling billiards," where trajectories refract through planar tilings. This system is motivated by a recent discovery of physical substances with negative indices of refraction. We…
Ladder tournaments are widely used to rank individuals in real-world organizations and games. Their mathematical properties however are still poorly understood. We formalize the ranking rule generated by a ladder tournament, and we show…
Many binary collective choice situations can be described as weighted simple voting games. We introduce weighted committee games to model decisions on an arbitrary number of alternatives in analogous fashion. We compare the effect of…