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Consider a game where Alice generates an integer and Bob wins if he can factor that integer. Traditional game theory tells us that Bob will always win this game even though in practice Alice will win given our usual assumptions about the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-11-18 Lance Fortnow , Rahul Santhanam

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-24 Joshua B. Miller

We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-02-26 Felix Günther , Irina Mustata

We study the following combinatorial game played by two players, Alice and Bob, which generalizes the Pizza game considered by Brown, Winkler and others. Given a connected graph G with nonnegative weights assigned to its vertices, the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2013-08-07 Josef Cibulka , Jan Kynčl , Viola Mészáros , Rudolf Stolař , Pavel Valtr

We consider the setting of repeated fair division between two players, denoted Alice and Bob, with private valuations over a cake. In each round, a new cake arrives, which is identical to the ones in previous rounds. Alice cuts the cake at…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Simina Brânzei , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Reed Phillips , Suho Shin , Kun Wang

For sequential betting games, Kelly's theory, aimed at maximization of the logarithmic growth of one's account value, involves optimization of the so-called betting fraction $K$. In this Letter, we extend the classical formulation to allow…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-24 Joseph D. O'Brien , Kevin Burke , Mark E. Burke , B. Ross Barmish

In communication complexity the input of a function $f:X\times Y\rightarrow Z$ is distributed between two players Alice and Bob. If Alice knows only $x\in X$ and Bob only $y\in Y$, how much information must Alice and Bob share to be able to…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Simon Mackenzie , Abdallah Saffidine

We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-29 Sergi Elizalde , Yixin Lin

Winning probabilities of The Hat Game (Ebert's Hat Problem) with three players and three colors are only known in the symmetric case: all probabilities of the colors are equal. This paper solves the asymmetric case: probabilities may be…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-11-25 Theo van Uem

Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Mathew Drexel , Xuanshan Peng , Jacob Richey

Penney's Ante exhibits non-transitivity when two target strings race to appear in a shared stream of coin tosses. We study instead independent string races, where each player observes their own independent and identically distributed…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-26 Søren Riis , Mike Paterson

In a two-player game, two cooperating but non communicating players, Alice and Bob, receive inputs taken from a probability distribution. Each of them produces an output and they win the game if they satisfy some predicate on their…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-02-22 André Chailloux , Giannicola Scarpa

We study a game puzzle that has enjoyed recent popularity among mathematicians, computer scientist, coding theorists and even the mass press. In the game, $n$ players are fitted with randomly assigned colored hats. Individual players can…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2007-07-16 Hendrik W. Lenstra , Gadiel Seroussi

We help Alice play a certain "convergence game" against Bob and win the prize, which is a constructive solution to a problem by Erd\H{o}s and Graham, posed in their 1980 book on open questions in combinatorial number theory. Namely, after…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Vjekoslav Kovač

We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-07-07 Jan Vrbik , Paul Vrbik

We consider the following cake cutting game: Alice chooses a set P of n points in the square (cake) [0,1]^2, where (0,0) is in P; Bob cuts out n axis-parallel rectangles with disjoint interiors, each of them having a point of P as the lower…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2011-04-04 Tobias Christ , Andrea Francke , Heidi Gebauer , Jiří Matoušek , Takeaki Uno

Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-01-29 Nemo Semret

Team captains Alice and Bob divide up $2m$ footballers, each reduced to a real-valued score, into two teams of $m$ footballers each. On each turn, one captain plays picker, and the other chooser: the picker names a footballer yet to be…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-06 Bhargav Narayanan

`Twenty questions' is a guessing game played by two players: Bob thinks of an integer between $1$ and $n$, and Alice's goal is to recover it using a minimal number of Yes/No questions. Shannon's entropy has a natural interpretation in this…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Yuval Dagan , Yuval Filmus , Daniel Kane , Shay Moran