Related papers: Kramnik vs Nakamura: A Chess Scandal
Motivated by the controversy in the chess community, where Hikaru Nakamura, a renowned grandmaster, has posted multiple impressive winning streaks over the years on the online platform chess.com, we derive the probabilities of various types…
Chess and chance are seemingly strange bedfellows. Luck and/or randomness have no apparent role in move selection when the game is played at the highest levels. However, when competition is at the ultimate level, that of the World Chess…
Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural…
We investigate the transient and steady-state dynamics of the Bennati-Dragulescu-Yakovenko money game in the presence of probabilistic cheaters, who can misrepresent their financial status by claiming to have no money. We derive the…
The game of Knockout is a classic playground game played with two basketballs. This paper uses a Markov process to analyze each player's probability of winning the game given their starting position in line and shooting percentages,…
The presence or absence of winner-loser effects is a widely discussed phenomenon across both sports and psychology research. Investigation of such effects is often hampered by the limited availability of data. Online chess has exploded in…
The Nakamura number is an appropriate invariant of a simple game to study the existence of social equilibria and the possibility of cycles. For symmetric quota games its number can be obtained by an easy formula. For some subclasses of…
In 2000 Allen Schwenk, using a well-known mathematical model of matchplay tournaments in which the probability of one player beating another in a single match is fixed for each pair of players, showed that the classical single-elimination,…
Nakamoto consensus underlies the security of many of the world's largest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Common lore is that Nakamoto consensus only achieves consistency and liveness under a regime where the difficulty of…
It is odd that chess grandmasters often disagree in their analysis of positions, sometimes even of simple ones, and that a grandmaster can hold his own against an powerful analytic machine such as Deep Blue. The fact that there must exist…
The existence of "Hot Hands" and "Streaks" in sports and gambling is hotly debated, but there is no uncertainty about the recent batting-average of the New York Times: it is now two-for-two in mangling and misunderstanding elementary…
In forecasting competitions, the traditional mechanism scores the predictions of each contestant against the outcome of each event, and the contestant with the highest total score wins. While it is well-known that this traditional mechanism…
The fundamental attack against blockchain systems is the double-spend attack. In this tutorial, we provide a very detailed explanation of just one section of Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper where the attack's probability of success is…
The Nakamura number of a simple game plays a critical role in preference aggregation (or multi-criterion ranking): the number of alternatives that the players can always deal with rationally is less than this number. We comprehensively…
Our ignorance of the winnability percentage of the solitaire card game `Klondike' has been described as ``one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics''. Klondike, the game in the Windows Solitaire program, is just one of many…
In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
This article deals with ranking methods. We study the situation where a tournament between $n$ players $P_1$, $P_2$, \ldots $P_n$ gives the ranking $P_1 \succ P_2 \succ \cdots \succ P_n$, but, if the results of $P_n$ are no longer taken…
A tournament $H$ is said to force quasirandomness if it has the property that a sequence $(T_n)_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$ of tournaments of increasing orders is quasirandom if and only if the homomorphism density of $H$ in $T_n$ tends to…
There are several approaches for using computers in deriving mathematical proofs. For their illustration, we provide an in-depth study of using computer support for proving one complex combinatorial conjecture -- correctness of a strategy…