Related papers: A Fourier approach to Levine's hat puzzle
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
We consider an assignment problem that has aspects of fair division as well as social choice. In particular, we investigate the problem of assigning a small subset from a set of indivisible items to multiple players so that the chosen…
Applications of machine learning inform human decision makers in a broad range of tasks. The resulting problem is usually formulated in terms of a single decision maker. We argue that it should rather be described as a two-player learning…
At the end, the house always wins! This simple truth holds for all public games of chance. Nevertheless, since lotteries have existed, people have tried everything to give luck a helping hand. This article compares objective scientific…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…
The game of Hangman is a classical asymmetric two player game in which one player, the setter, chooses a secret word from a language, that the other player, the guesser, tries to discover through single letter matching queries, answered by…
Consider a situation with $n$ agents or players where some of the players form a coalition with a certain collective objective. Simple games are used to model systems that can decide whether coalitions are successful (winning) or not…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
We present a new family of Nim games where the rules depend on a given `coloring' of the tokens, each token being either black or white. The rules are as in Nim with the restriction that a white token on top of each heap is not allowed. We…
On March 16, 2024, Daniel Litt, in an X-post, proposed the following brainteaser: "Flip a fair coin 100 times. It gives a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). For each HH in the sequence of flips, Alice gets a point; for each HT, Bob does,…
For a topological space $X$ and a point $x \in X$, consider the following game -- related to the property of $X$ being countably tight at $x$. In each inning $n\in\omega$, the first player chooses a set $A_n$ that clusters at $x$, and then…
This paper analyzes a simple game with $n$ players. We fix a mean, $\mu$, in the interval $[0, 1]$ and let each player choose any random variable distributed on that interval with the given mean. The winner of the zero-sum game is the…
We propose a two-agent game wherein a questioner must be able to conjure discerning questions between sentences, incorporate responses from an answerer, and keep track of a hypothesis state. The questioner must be able to understand the…
We present an analysis of a coin-tossing problem posed by Daniel Litt which has generated some popular interest. We demonstrate a recursive identity which leads to relatively simple formulas for the excess number of wins for one player over…
In this paper, we address an instance of uniquely solvable mean-field game with a common noise whose corresponding counterpart without common noise has several equilibria. We study the selection problem for this mean-field game without…
In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…
We show that, in John Conway's board game Phutball (or Philosopher's Football), it is NP-complete to determine whether the current player has a move that immediately wins the game. In contrast, the similar problems of determining whether…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
We analyze the version of the deterministic Hats game. In this paper, we present new constructors, i.e. theorems that allow built winning strategies for the sages on different graphs. Using this technique we calculate the hat guessing…