Related papers: Penney's game for permutations
We study a modified prisoner's dilemma game taking place on two-dimensional disordered square lattices. The players are pure strategists and can either cooperate or defect with their immediate neighbors. In the generations each player…
In a monotonic sequence game, two players alternately choose elements of a sequence from some fixed ordered set. The game ends when the resulting sequence contains either an ascending subsequence of length a or a descending one of length d.…
We analyze the following general version of the deterministic Hats game. Several sages wearing colored hats occupy the vertices of a graph. Each sage can have a hat of one of $k$ colors. Each sage tries to guess the color of his own hat…
Repetition-based draw rules in deterministic games like chess ensure termination but introduce strategic artifacts, allowing players to enforce draws independent of positional value. We propose an asymmetric modification: threefold…
Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value…
That there exist two losing games that can be combined, either by random mixture or by nonrandom alternation, to form a winning game is known as Parrondo's paradox. We establish a strong law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for…
We present and study a variant of the mean payoff games introduced by A. Ehrenfeucht and J. Mycielski. In this version, the second player makes an infinite sequence of moves only after the first player's sequence of moves has been decided…
A permutation is $k$-coverable if it can be partitioned into $k$ monotone subsequences. Barber conjectured that, for any given permutation, if every subsequence of length $k+2 \choose 2$ is $k$-coverable then the permutation itself is…
An {\it inversion} of a tournament $T$ is obtained by reversing the direction of all edges with both endpoints in some set of vertices. Let ${\rm inv}_k(T)$ be the minimum length of a sequence of inversions using sets of size at most $k$…
One of the most popular lottery games worldwide is the so-called ``lotto k/N''. It considers N numbers 1,2,...,N from which k are drawn randomly, without replacement. A player selects k or more numbers and the first prize is shared amongst…
Denote by $p(k)$ the limit, as $n \rightarrow \infty$, of the probability that a random permutation on a set of size $n$ has an invariant set of size $k$. We give an asymptotic formula for $p(k)$, showing that it is asymptotically…
We study a variant of the synchronization game on finite deterministic automata. In this game, Alice chooses one input letter of an automaton $A$ on each of her moves while Bob may respond with an arbitrary finite word over the input…
Let $n = b_1 + ... + b_k = b_1' + \cdot + b_k'$ be a pair of compositions of $n$ into $k$ positive parts. We say this pair is {\em irreducible} if there is no positive $j < k$ for which $b_1 + ... b_j = b_1' + ... b_j'$. The probability…
Normally a chess problem must have a unique solution, and is deemed unsound even if there are alternatives that differ only in the order in which the same moves are played. In an enumerative chess problem, the set of moves in the solution…
We define a game semantics for second order classical arithmetic PA2 (with quantifiers over predicates on integers and full comprehension axiom). Our semantics is effective: moves are described by a finite amount of information and whenever…
We consider two-player games played on finite colored graphs where the goal is the construction of an infinite path with one of the following frequency-related properties: (i) all colors occur with the same asymptotic frequency, (ii) there…
We define a variant of the two-dimensional Silver Dollar game. Two coins are placed on a chessboard of unbounded size, and two players take turns choosing one of the coins and moving it. Coins are to be moved to the left or upward…
We study a game in which one keeps flipping a coin until a given finite string of heads and tails occurs. We find the expected number of coin flips to end the game when the ending string consists of at most four maximal runs of heads or…
We study the problem of deciding the winner of reachability switching games for zero-, one-, and two-player variants. Switching games provide a deterministic analogue of stochastic games. We show that the zero-player case is NL-hard, the…
We examine the number of cycles of length k in a permutation, as a function on the symmetric group. We write it explicitly as a combination of characters of irreducible representations. This allows to study formation of long cycles in the…