Related papers: Note on a Coin Tossing Problem Posed by Daniel Lit…
I introduce, solve and generalize a new coin puzzle that involves parallel weighings.
We consider in this paper an urn and ball problem with replacement, where balls are with different colors and are drawn uniformly from a unique urn. The numbers of balls with a given color are i.i.d. random variables with a heavy tailed…
The Travelling Thief Problem (TTP) is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem that attracts many scholars. The TTP interconnects two well-known NP-hard problems: the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the 0-1 Knapsack Problem…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
It is known that repeated gambling over the outcomes of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables gives rise to alternate operational meaning of entropies in the classical case in terms of the doubling rates. We give…
Tossing a coin is the most elementary Monte Carlo experiment. In a computer the coin is replaced by a pseudo random number generator. It can be shown analytically and by exact enumerations that popular random number generators are not…
The theory behind the Lights Out game has been developed by several authors. The aim of this work is to present some results related to this game using Linear Algebra. We establish a criterion for the solubility of this game in the case of…
We provide a mechanism that uses two biased coins and implements any distribution on a finite set of elements, in such a way that even if the outcomes of one of the coins is determined by an adversary, the final distribution remains…
Three science and engineering problems of recent interests -index coding, locally recoverable distributed storage, and guessing games on graphs- are discussed and the connection between their optimal solutions is elucidated. By generalizing…
In this paper we study the Three Hat Problem which appeared in Puzzle Corner of the Technology Review magazine. This puzzle gives a scenario in which three players wearing hats are sitting together and each hat can be seen by everyone…
In 1976, Knuth and Yao presented an algorithm for sampling from a finite distribution using flips of a fair coin that on average used the optimal number of flips. Here we show how to easily run their algorithm for the special case of…
This paper presents an efficient algorithm to solve the sleeping bandit with multiple plays problem in the context of an online recommendation system. The problem involves bounded, adversarial loss and unknown i.i.d. distributions for arm…
Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…
In this paper, we study a pricing problem of the multiple reset put option, which allows the holder to reset several times a current strike price to obtain an at-the-money European put option. We formulate the pricing problem as a multiple…
After a general introduction, the thesis is divided into four parts. In the first, we discuss the task of coin tossing, principally in order to highlight the effect different physical theories have on security in a straightforward manner,…
In this paper, we will give an improvement on the lower bound for the counterfeit coins problem in the case that the number of false coins is unknown in advance
Suppose Alice has a coin with heads probability $q$ and Bob has one with heads probability $p>q$. Now each of them will toss their coin $n$ times, and Alice will win iff she gets more heads than Bob does. Evidently the game favors Bob, but…
This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…
Toral (2002) considered an ensemble of N\geq2 players. In game B a player is randomly selected to play Parrondo's original capital-dependent game. In game A' two players are randomly selected without replacement, and the first transfers one…
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…