Related papers: A Fourier approach to Levine's hat puzzle
Every simple game is a monotone Boolean function. For the other direction we just have to exclude the two constant functions. The enumeration of monotone Boolean functions with distinguishable variables is also known as the Dedekind's…
This paper considers a game-theoretic formulation of the covert communications problem with finite blocklength, where the transmitter (Alice) can randomly vary her transmit power in different blocks, while the warden (Willie) can randomly…
A large body of research is currently investigating on the connection between machine learning and game theory. In this work, game theory notions are injected into a preference learning framework. Specifically, a preference learning problem…
We introduce a simple one-parameter game derived from a model describing the properties of a directed polymer in a random medium. At his turn, each of the two players picks a move among two alternatives in order to maximize his final score,…
Suppose you and your friend both do $n$ tosses of an unfair coin with probability of heads equal to $\alpha$. What is the behavior of the probability that you obtain at least $d$ more heads than your friend if you make $r$ additional…
Connect Four is a two-player game where each player attempts to be the first to create a sequence of four of their pieces, arranged horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, by dropping pieces into the columns of a grid of width seven and…
This paper presents a solution to the Knights and Spies Problem: In a room there are n people, each labelled with a unique number between 1 and n. A person may either be a knight or a spy. Knights always tell the truth, while spies may…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
We give examples of situations -- stochastic production, military tactics, corporate merger -- where it is beneficial to concentrate risk rather than to diversify it, that is, to put all eggs in one basket. Our examples admit a dual…
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…
The secretary problem or the game of Googol are classic models for online selection problems that have received significant attention in the last five decades. We consider a variant of the problem and explore its connections to data-driven…
We consider a Polya urn, started with b black and w white balls, where b>w. We compute the probability that there are ever the same number of black and white balls in the urn, and show that it is twice the probability of getting no more…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
We study two types of two player, perfect information games with no chance moves, played on the edge set of the binomial random graph ${\mathcal G}(n,p)$. In each round of the $(1 : q)$ Waiter-Client Hamiltonicity game, the first player,…
We propose a game-theoretic framework that incorporates both incomplete information and general ambiguity attitudes on factors external to all players. Our starting point is players' preferences on payoff-distribution vectors, essentially…
The game in which acts of participants don't have an adequate description in terms of Boolean logic and classical theory of probabilities is considered. The model of the game interaction is constructed on the basis of a non-distributive…
In the past three decades, deductive games have become interesting from the algorithmic point of view. Deductive games are two players zero sum games of imperfect information. The first player, called "codemaker", chooses a secret code and…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and…