Related papers: Bluffing in Scrabble
Suppose that the outcomes of a roulette table are not entirely random, in the sense that there exists a successful betting strategy. Is there a successful `separable' strategy, in the sense that it does not use the winnings from betting on…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
"Guess Who?" is a popular two player game where players ask "Yes"/"No" questions to search for their opponent's secret identity from a pool of possible candidates. This is modeled as a simple stochastic game. Using this model, the optimal…
Poker is a large complex game of imperfect information, which has been singled out as a major AI challenge problem. Recently there has been a series of breakthroughs culminating in agents that have successfully defeated the strongest human…
We investigate the probability of scoring a point when playing the basketball shooting game called "Horse". We show that under the Traditional Rules, it is optimal to choose very easy shots. We propose alternative rules called Pops Rules,…
In many countries poker is one of the most popular card games. Although each variant of poker has its own rules, all involve the use of money to make the challenge meaningful. Nowadays, in the collective consciousness, some variants of…
What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given \$25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61…
When facing a heavily-favored opponent, an underdog must be willing to assume greater-than-average risk. In statistical language, one would say that an underdog must be willing to adopt a strategy whose outcome has a larger-than-average…
The subject of this paper is a variation of a blackjack game, mainly popular in some parts of Europe where it is known as einz (in German slang: one). We describe the rules of this game, indicate its main characteristics, give some…
A decision maker observes the evolving state of the world while constantly trying to predict the next state given the history of past states. The ability to benefit from such predictions depends not only on the ability to recognize patters…
We study biased Maker-Breaker positional games between two players, one of whom is playing randomly against an opponent with an optimal strategy. In this paper we consider the scenario when Maker plays randomly and Breaker is "clever", and…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
We give elementary examples within a framework for studying decisions under uncertainty where probabilities are only roughly known. The framework, in gambling terms, is that the size of a bet is proportional to the gambler's perceived…
This paper explores the entertainment experience and learning experience in Scrabble. It proposes a new measure from the educational point of view, which we call learning coefficient, based on the balance between the learner's skill and the…
A knockout tournament is one of the most simple and popular forms of competition. Here, we are given a binary tournament tree where all leaves are labeled with seed position names. The players participating in the tournament are assigned to…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
We consider imperfect information stochastic games where we require the players to use pure (i.e. non randomised) strategies. We consider reachability, safety, B\"uchi and co-B\"uchi objectives, and investigate the existence of…
In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…
Probabilistic concurrent/distributed strategies have so far not been investigated thoroughly in the context of imperfect information, where the Player has only partial knowledge of the moves made by the Opponent. In a situation where the…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. A ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards, where one after…