Related papers: Kramnik vs Nakamura: A Chess Scandal
This recreational mathematics article shows that the game of Snakes and Ladders is intransitive: square 69 has a winning edge over 79, which in turn beats 73, which beats 69. Analysis of the game is a nice illustration of Markov chains,…
We consider the problem of rational secret sharing introduced by Halpern and Teague [1], where the players involved in secret sharing play only if it is to their advantage. This can be characterized in the form of preferences. Players would…
Theoretical guarantees for double spending probabilities for the Nakamoto consensus under the $k$-deep confirmation rule have been extensively studied for zero/bounded network delays and fixed mining rates. In this paper, we introduce a…
Two-player stochastic games are games with two 2 players and a randomised entity called "nature". A natural question to ask in this framework is the existence of strategies that ensure that an event happens with probability 1 (almost-sure…
Mertens [In Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians (Berkeley, Calif., 1986) (1987) 1528-1577 Amer. Math. Soc.] proposed two general conjectures about repeated games: the first one is that, in any two-person zero-sum…
We study biased Maker-Breaker positional games between two players, one of whom is playing randomly against an opponent with an optimal strategy. In this work we focus on the case of Breaker playing randomly and Maker being "clever". The…
Let G be a finite graph with the non-k-order property (essentially, a uniform finite bound on the size of an induced sub-half-graph). A major result of the paper applies model-theoretic arguments to obtain a stronger version of…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
We study data corruption robustness in offline two-player zero-sum Markov games. Given a dataset of realized trajectories of two players, an adversary is allowed to modify an $\epsilon$-fraction of it. The learner's goal is to identify an…
In his paper "Kings in Bipartite Hypertournaments" (Graphs $\&$ Combinatorics 35, 2019), Petrovic stated two conjectures on 4-kings in multipartite hypertournaments. We prove one of these conjectures and give counterexamples for the other.
The computational complexity of winner determination is a classical and important problem in computational social choice. Previous work based on worst-case analysis has established NP-hardness of winner determination for some classic voting…
The $1/2$-conjecture on the domination game asserts that if $G$ is a traceable graph, then the game domination number $\gamma_g(G)$ of $G$ is at most $\left\lceil \frac{n(G)}{2} \right\rceil$. A traceable graph is a $1/2$-graph if…
The stable marriage problem, as addressed by Gale and Shapely [1] consists of providing a bipartite matching between n " boys " and n " girls "-each of whom have a totally ordered preference list over the other set-such that there exists no…
The independent chip model (ICM) forms a cornerstone of all modern poker tournament strategy. However, despite its prominence, the ICM's performance in the real world has not been sufficiently scrutinized, especially at a large scale. In…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
We investigate a pool of international chess title holders born between 1901 and 1943. Using Elo ratings we compute for every player his expected score in a game with a randomly selected player from the pool. We use this figure as player's…
Positions of chess players in intransitive (rock-paper-scissors) relations are considered. Namely, position A of White is preferable (it should be chosen if choice is possible) to position B of Black, position B of Black is preferable to…
We extend the standard online worst-case model to accommodate past experience which is available to the online player in many practical scenarios. We do this by revealing a random sample of the adversarial input to the online player ahead…
Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity. It has served to study human behavior from the perspective of a wide number of disciplines, from cognitive skills such as memory and learning, to…