Related papers: A Random-Player Game and Derangement Numbers
We study two impartial games introduced by Anderson and Harary. Both games are played by two players who alternately select previously-unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a generating set from the…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
Consider a P\'olya urn where a drawn ball of colour $i$ is replaced together with a fixed number $m_i$ of balls of the same colour. We give a simple proof that if, for example, there are two colours and the urn starts with more balls of…
A knockout tournament is one of the most simple and popular forms of competition. Here, we are given a binary tournament tree where all leaves are labeled with seed position names. The players participating in the tournament are assigned to…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules for round-robin tournaments of $n$ competitors. Specifically, $n$ competitors are competing for a prize, and a tournament rule $r$ maps the result of all $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches…
Given an integer-valued matrix $A$ of dimension $\ell \times k$ and an integer-valued vector $b$ of dimension $\ell$, the Maker-Breaker $(A,b)$-game on a set of integers $X$ is the game where Maker and Breaker take turns claiming previously…
Domination game [SIAM J.\ Discrete Math.\ 24 (2010) 979--991] and total domination game [Graphs Combin.\ 31 (2015) 1453--1462] are by now well established games played on graphs by two players, named Dominator and Staller. In this paper,…
We consider a general class of round-robin tournament models of equally strong players. In these models, each of the $n$ players competes against every other player exactly once. For each match between two players, the outcome is a value…
A gambler with an initial fortune $x$ starts by betting a dollar, then doubles the bet after every win and halves the bet after every loss. Let $p\in (0,1)$ be the probability of winning for each round. We show that the gambler survives…
We consider the classical one-dimensional random walk of a particle on the right-half real line. We assume that the particle is initially at position x=k, k > 0, and moves to the right with probability p or to the left with probability 1-p.…
Toral (2002) considered an ensemble of N\geq2 players. In game B a player is randomly selected to play Parrondo's original capital-dependent game. In game A' two players are randomly selected without replacement, and the first transfers one…
We consider two-player zero-sum games on graphs. These games can be classified on the basis of the information of the players and on the mode of interaction between them. On the basis of information the classification is as follows: (a)…
We introduce a natural variant of weighted voting games, which we refer to as k-Prize Weighted Voting Games. Such games consist of n players with weights, and k prizes, of possibly differing values. The players form coalitions, and the i-th…
In a Maker-Breaker game on a graph $G$, Breaker and Maker alternately claim edges of $G$. Maker wins if, after all edges have been claimed, the graph induced by his edges has some desired property. We consider four Maker-Breaker games…
The numbers game is a one-player game played on a finite simple graph with certain "amplitudes" assigned to its edges and with an initial assignment of real numbers to its nodes. The moves of the game successively transform the numbers at…
Toral introduced so-called cooperative Parrondo games, in which there are N players (3 or more) arranged in a circle. At each turn one player is randomly chosen to play. He plays either game A or game B. Game A results in a win or loss of…
We study parity games in which one of the two players controls only a small number $k$ of nodes and the other player controls the $n-k$ other nodes of the game. Our main result is a fixed-parameter algorithm that solves bipartite parity…
Given a graph G and an integer k, two players take turns coloring the vertices of G one by one using k colors so that neighboring vertices get different colors. The first player wins iff at the end of the game all the vertices of G are…
Can a probabilistic gambler get arbitrarily rich when all deterministic gamblers fail? We study this problem in the context of algorithmic randomness, introducing a new notion -- almost everywhere computable randomness. A binary sequence…
Two-player stochastic games are games with two 2 players and a randomised entity called "nature". A natural question to ask in this framework is the existence of strategies that ensure that an event happens with probability 1 (almost-sure…