Related papers: On cases where Litt's game is fair
We study a cooperative game in which each member of a team of $N$ players, wearing coloured hats and situated at the vertices of a cycle graph $C_N$, is guessing their own hat colour merely on the basis of observing the hats worn by their…
We study a recently introduced two-person combinatorial game, the $(a,b)$-monochromatic clique transversal game which is played by Alice and Bob on a graph $G$. As we observe, this game is equivalent to the $(b,a)$-biased Maker-Breaker game…
In a recent article in American Scientist, Theodore Hill described a coin-tossing game whose pay-off is the number of heads over the total number of throws. Suppose that at a given point during the game you have 5 heads and 3 tails, should…
The MandM Game involves two players who begin with I1 and I2 MandM's. During each round, each player tosses a fair coin: if the coin lands heads, that player eats one MandM, and if it lands tails, the player does not eat. If, at the end of…
In a combinatorial exchange setting, players place sell (resp. buy) bids on combinations of traded goods. Besides the question of finding an optimal selection of winning bids, the question of how to share the obtained profit is of high…
Two-player zero-sum "graph games" are a central model, which proceeds as follows. A token is placed on a vertex of a graph, and the two players move it to produce an infinite "play", which determines the winner or payoff of the game.…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer can be expressed as the sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers. This theorem inspired a beautiful game, the Zeckendorf Game. Two players begin with $n \ 1$'s and take turns applying rules…
In this paper we quantize the Card Game. In the classical version of this game, one player (Alice) can always win with propability 2/3. But when the other player (Bob) is allowed to apply quantum strategy, the original unfair game turns…
A classical result of K. L. Chung and W. Feller deals with the partial sums $S_k$ arising in a fair coin-tossing game. If $N_n$ is the number of "positive" terms among $S_1, S_2,\dots,S_n$ then the quantity $P(N_{2n}=2r)$ takes an elegant…
We study the class of word-building games, where two players pick letters from a finite alphabet to construct a finite or infinite word. The outcome is determined by whether the resulting word lies in a prescribed set (a win for player $A$)…
We verify a conjecture of Nowakowski and Ottaway that closed $1 \times n$ Dots-and-Triangles is a first-player win when $n \neq 2$. We also prove that in both the open and closed $1 \times n$ Dots-and-Boxes games where $n$ is even, the…
Consider equipping an alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ with a group action that partitions the set of words into equivalence classes which we call patterns. We answer standard questions for the Penney's game on patterns and show non-transitivity for…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. A ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards, where one after…
We introduce the competitive assignment problem, a two-player version of the well-known assignment problem. Given a set of tasks and a set of agents with different efficiencies for different tasks, Alice and Bob take turns picking agents…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit model captures the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the effects of competition and cooperation on this tradeoff. Suppose there are $k$ arms and two players, Alice and Bob. In every…
Let $p,q$ be two integers with $p\geq q$. Given a finite graph $F$ with no isolated vertices, the generalized Ramsey achievement game of $F$ on the complete graph $K_n$, denoted by $(p,q;K_n,F,+)$, is played by two players called Alice and…
While it is well known that a Turing machine equipped with the ability to flip a fair coin cannot compute more that a standard Turing machine, we show that this is not true for a biased coin. Indeed, any oracle set $X$ may be coded as a…
Bob cuts a pizza into slices of not necessarily equal size and shares it with Alice by alternately taking turns. One slice is taken in each turn. The first turn is Alice's. She may choose any of the slices. In all other turns only those…
The Collision problem is to decide whether a given list of numbers $(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\in[n]^n$ is $1$-to-$1$ or $2$-to-$1$ when promised one of them is the case. We show an $n^{\Omega(1)}$ randomised communication lower bound for the natural…
Some statements have one well-defined continuation (e.g., "the Eiffel Tower is in [Paris]"), whereas others have a natural distribution over multiple options (e.g., "the weighted coin flip was [Heads/Tails].") We argue that language model…