Related papers: Matching adjacent cards
Three well-studied types of subgraph-restricted matchings are induced matchings, uniquely restricted matchings, and acyclic matchings. While it is hard to determine the maximum size of a matching of each of these types, whether some given…
We construct irreducible balanced non-transitive sets of $n$-sided dice for any positive integer $n$, which was raised in \cite[Question 5.2]{SS17}. One main tool of the construction is to study so-called fair sets of dice. Furthermore, we…
We find an exact formula for the number of directed 5-cycles in a tournament in terms of its edge score sequence. We use this formula to find both upper and lower bounds on the number of 5-cycles in any $n$-tournament. In particular, we…
We introduce the problem of ranking with slot constraints, which can be used to model a wide range of application problems -- from college admission with limited slots for different majors, to composing a stratified cohort of eligible…
Tournaments can be used to model a variety of practical scenarios including sports competitions and elections. A natural notion of strength of alternatives in a tournament is a generalized king: an alternative is said to be a $k$-king if it…
Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
Let $M$ be an ordered matching of size $n$, that is, a partition of the set $[2n]$ into 2-element subsets. The sock number of $M$ is the maximum size of a sub-matching of $M$ in which all left-ends of the edges precede all the right-ends…
We study the ratio, in a finite graph, of the sizes of the largest matching in any pair of disjoint matchings with the maximum total number of edges and the largest possible matching. Previously, it was shown that this ratio is between 4/5…
We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…
This paper studies the equilibrium properties of the ``obvious strategy profile'' in large finite-player games. Each player in such a strategy profile simply adopts a randomized strategy as she would have used in a symmetric equilibrium of…
Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…
List coloring generalizes graph coloring by requiring the color of a vertex to be selected from a list of colors specific to that vertex. One refinement of list coloring, called choosability with separation, requires that the intersection…
We consider the generalized game Lights Out played on a graph and investigate the following question: for a given positive integer $n$, what is the probability that a graph chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
Infinite games where several players seek to coordinate under imperfect information are deemed to be undecidable, unless the information is hierarchically ordered among the players. We identify a class of games for which joint winning…
We characterise and enumerate permutations that are sortable by n-4 passes through a stack. We conjecture the number of permutations sortable by n-5 passes, and also the form of a formula for the general case n-k, which involves a…
We are given a bipartite graph that contains at least one perfect matching and where each edge is colored from a set $Q=\{c_1,c_2,\ldots,c_q}\$. Let $Q_i=\set{e\in E(G):c(e)=c_i}$, where $c(e)$ denotes the color of $e$. The perfect matching…
Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…
We find surprisingly simple formulas for the limiting probability that the rank of a randomly selected vertex in a randomly selected phylogenetic tree or generalized phylogenetic tree is a given integer.