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Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the well known tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) board game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields", each of them being a tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player…
What is a finite-state strategy in a delay game? We answer this surprisingly non-trivial question and present a very general framework for computing such strategies: they exist for all winning conditions that are recognized by automata with…
We introduce and analyze the Walker-Breaker game, a variant of Maker-Breaker games where Maker is constrained to choose edges of a walk or path in a given graph G, with the goal of visiting as many vertices of the underlying graph as…
The strategy improvement algorithm for mean payoff games and parity games is a local improvement algorithm, just like the simplex algorithm for linear programs. Their similarity has turned out very useful: many lower bounds on running time…
Fighting Fantasy is a popular recreational fantasy gaming system worldwide. Combat in this system progresses through a stochastic game involving a series of rounds, each of which may be won or lost. Each round, a limited resource (`luck')…
We consider two-player normal form games where each player has the same finite strategy set. The payoffs of each player are assumed to be i.i.d. random variables with a continuous distribution. We show that, with high probability, the…
Binary decisions are the simplest form of decisions that are made in our daily lives. Examples include choosing a two-way path in a maze, accepting or declining an offer, etc. These decisions are also made by computers, machines and various…
The Taxman game has proven to be hard to solve optimally, so efforts have been made to find heuristic strategies that do well in practice. We present results on the NP-hardness of a variant of the game via an equivalence to a particular…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
We analyze the computational complexity of the problem of deciding whether, for a given simple game, there exists the possibility of rearranging the participants in a set of $j$ given losing coalitions into a set of $j$ winning coalitions.…
A gambler walks into a hypothetical fair casino with a very real dollar bill, but by the time he leaves he's exchanged the dollar for a random amount of money. What is lost in the process? It may be that the gambler walks out at the end of…
Simple board games, like Tic-Tac-Toe and CONNECT-4, play an important role not only in the development of mathematical and logical skills, but also in the emotional and social development. In this paper, we address the problem of generating…
Finding a counterfeit coin with the different weight from a set of visually identical coin using a balance, usually a two-armed balance, known as the balance question, is an intersting and inspiring question. Its variants involve…
This paper examines the relationship between casino rules, players' gambling strategies, and their expected returns, and derives the formula about the players' expected return.
Defensive forecasting is a method of transforming laws of probability (stated in game-theoretic terms as strategies for Sceptic) into forecasting algorithms. There are two known varieties of defensive forecasting: "continuous", in which…
We study the problem of checking for the existence of constrained pure Nash equilibria in a subclass of polymatrix games defined on weighted directed graphs. The payoff of a player is defined as the sum of nonnegative rational weights on…
We carry out a game-theoretic analysis of the recursive game "Guts," a variant of poker featuring repeated play with possibly growing stakes. An interesting aspect of such games is the need to account for funds lost to all players if…
What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given \$25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61…
We study equilibrium strategies and the value of the asymmetric variant of the discrete Colonel Blotto game with $K \geq 2$ battlefields, $B \geq 1$ resources of the weaker player and $A > B$ resources of the stronger player. We derive…
In this paper, we investigate a largely extended version of classical MAB problem, called networked combinatorial bandit problems. In particular, we consider the setting of a decision maker over a networked bandits as follows: each time a…