Related papers: First to reach $n$ game

In this paper we solve the three-player-game question. A three-player-game consists of a series of rounds. There are altogether three players. Two players participate in each round, at the end of the round the loser quits and the third…

Two players take turns claiming empty cells from an $n\times n$ grid. The first player (if any) to occupy a transversal (a set of $ n $ cells having no two cells in the same row or column) is the winner. What is the outcome of the game…

The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…

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,…

In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…

We characterize the initial positions from which the first player has a winning strategy in a certain two-player game. This provides a generalization of Hall's theorem. Vizing's edge coloring theorem follows from a special case.

N players are randomly fitted with a colored hat (q different colors). All players guess simultaneously the color of their own hat observing only the hat colors of the other N-1 players. The team wins if all players guess right. No…

League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…

We study first passage statistics of the Polya urn model. In this random process, the urn contains two types of balls. In each step, one ball is drawn randomly from the urn, and subsequently placed back into the urn together with an…

We consider two-player normal form games where each player has the same finite strategy set. The payoffs of each player are assumed to be i.i.d. random variables with a continuous distribution. We show that, with high probability, the…

A game in which one player makes unitary transformations of a simple system, and another seeks to confound the resulting state by a randomly chosen action is analyzed carefully. It is shown that the second player can reduce any system to a…

The usual $n$-in-a-row game is a positional game in which two player alternately claim points in $\bb{Z}^2$ with the winner being the first player to claim $n$ consecutive points in a line. We consider a variant of the game, suggested by…

In set theory without the axiom of regularity, we consider a game in which two players choose in turn an element of a given set, an element of this element, etc.; a player wins if its adversary cannot make any next move. Sets that are…

Parrondo's coin-tossing games comprise two games, $A$ and $B$. The result of game $A$ is determined by the toss of a fair coin. The result of game $B$ is determined by the toss of a $p_0$-coin if capital is a multiple of $r$, and by the…

Let A be a finite subset of $\nat$. Then NIM(A;n) is the following 2-player game: initially there are $n$ stones on the board and the players alternate removing $a\in A$ stones. The first player who cannot move loses. This game has been…

Regular games form a well-established class of games for analysis and synthesis of reactive systems. They include coloured Muller games, McNaughton games, Muller games, Rabin games, and Streett games. These games are played on directed…

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 study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…

We consider a class of infinite-state stochastic games generated by stateless pushdown automata (or, equivalently, 1-exit recursive state machines), where the winning objective is specified by a regular set of target configurations and a…

Consider a two-player game repeated N times. Player 1 can choose between two styles (for interpretability, offensive and defensive), whereas Player 2 uses a single fixed style. Let X N\,:= \#wins -\#losses for Player 1 after N games, and…