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Ranking athletes by their performance in competitions and tournaments is common in every popular sport and has significant benefits that contribute to both the organization and strategic aspects of competitions. Although rankings are…
The paper discusses the strategy-proofness of sports tournaments with multiple group stages, where the results of matches already played in the previous round against teams in the same group are carried over. These tournaments, widely used…
The score sequence of a tournament is the sequence of the out-degrees of its vertices arranged in nondecreasing order. The problem of counting score sequences of a tournament with $n$ vertices is more than 100 years old (MacMahon 1920). In…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We consider the problem of selecting a portfolio of entries of fixed cardinality for contests with top-heavy payoff structures, i.e. most of the winnings go to the top-ranked entries. This framework is general and can be used to model a…
The total domination game is a two-person competitive optimization game, where the players, Dominator and Staller, alternately select vertices of an isolate-free graph $G$. Each vertex chosen must strictly increase the number of vertices…
Chess championships are often organised as a Swiss-system tournament, causing great challenges in ranking the participants due to the different strength of schedules and possible circular triads. The paper suggests that pairwise comparison…
We investigate zero-sum turn-based two-player stochastic games in which the objective of one player is to maximize the amount of rewards obtained during a play, while the other aims at minimizing it. We focus on games in which the minimizer…
In a strong game played on the edge set of a graph G there are two players, Red and Blue, alternating turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of G (with Red playing first). The winner is the first one to claim all the edges of some…
Energy parity games are infinite two-player turn-based games played on weighted graphs. The objective of the game combines a (qualitative) parity condition with the (quantitative) requirement that the sum of the weights (i.e., the level of…
In a round-robin tournament, a team may lack the incentive to win if its final rank does not depend on the outcome of the matches still to be played. This paper introduces a classification scheme to determine these weakly (where one team is…
In fantasy sports, strategic thinking-not mere luck-often defines who wins and who falls short. As fantasy cricket grows in popularity across India, understanding whether success stems from skill or chance has become both an analytical and…
A team of players plays the following game. After a strategy session, each player is randomly fitted with a blue or red hat. Then, without further communication, everybody can try to guess simultaneously his or her own hat color by looking…
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swiss-system chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of…
Despite incredible advances, deep learning has been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. Numerous approaches have been proposed to train robust networks both empirically and certifiably. However, most of them defend against only…
We consider concurrent mean-payoff games, a very well-studied class of two-player (player 1 vs player 2) zero-sum games on finite-state graphs where every transition is assigned a reward between 0 and 1, and the payoff function is the…
The domination game is played on a graph $G$ by two players, named Dominator and Staller. They alternatively select vertices of $G$ such that each chosen vertex enlarges the set of vertices dominated before the move on it. Dominator's goal…
We consider concurrent stochastic games played on graphs with reachability and safety objectives. These games can be solved by value iteration as well as strategy iteration, each of them yielding a sequence of under-approximations of the…
Tournament solutions provide methods for selecting the "best" alternatives from a tournament and have found applications in a wide range of areas. Previous work has shown that several well-known tournament solutions almost never rule out…
In this paper, we study one-player and two-player energy mean-payoff games. Energy mean-payoff games are games of infinite duration played on a finite graph with edges labeled by 2-dimensional weight vectors. The objective of the first…