Related papers: Bluffing in Scrabble
Graph Pebbling is a well-studied single-player game on graphs. We introduce the game of Blocking Pebbles which adapts Graph Pebbling into a two-player strategy game in order to examine it within the context of Combinatorial Game Theory.…
The current state-of-the-art Scrabble agents are not learning-based but depend on truncated Monte Carlo simulations and the quality of such agents is contingent upon the time available for running the simulations. This thesis takes steps…
In a $(1:b)$ biased Maker-Breaker game, how good a strategy is for a player can be measured by the bias range for which its rival can win, choosing an appropriate counterstrategy. Bednarska and {\L}uczak proved that, in the $H$-subgraph…
The role of an expert in the decision-making process is crucial, as the final recommendation depends on his disposition, clarity of mind, experience, and knowledge of the problem. However, the recommendation also depends on their honesty.…
We investigate a one-time single shelf shuffle by establishing the position matrix explicitly. In some cases, we prove a no-feedback optimal guessing strategy. A general no-feedback strategy is conjectured, and asymptotics for the expected…
Fighting Fantasy is a popular recreational fantasy gaming system worldwide. Combat in this system progresses through a stochastic game involving a series of rounds, each of which may be won or lost. Each round, a limited resource (`luck')…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
In this paper, we study the notion of admissibility for randomised strategies in concurrent games. Intuitively, an admissible strategy is one where the player plays `as well as possible', because there is no other strategy that dominates…
An algorithm based on backward induction is devised in order to compute the optimal sequence of games to be played in Parrondo games. The algorithm can be used to find the optimal sequence for any finite number of turns or in the steady…
In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…
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 work we focus on the case of Breaker playing randomly and Maker being "clever". The…
We report a new result on lotteries --- that a well-funded syndicate has a purely mechanical strategy to achieve expected returns of 10\% to 25\% in an equiprobable lottery with no take and no carryover pool. We prove that an optimal…
Two-player, turn-based, stochastic games with reachability conditions are considered, where the maximizer has no information (he is blind) and is restricted to deterministic strategies whereas the minimizer is perfectly informed. We ask the…
In a game of permutation wordle, a player attempts to guess a secret permutation in the fewest number of guesses possible. Previously, Samuel Kutin and Lawren Smithline (arXiv:2408.00903) introduced this game and proposed a strategy called…
We propose an analytically tractable variation of the minority game in which rational agents use probabilistic strategies. In our model, $N$ agents choose between two alternatives repeatedly, and those who are in the minority get a pay-off…
Poker is ideal for testing automated reasoning under uncertainty. It introduces uncertainty both by physical randomization and by incomplete information about opponents hands.Another source OF uncertainty IS the limited information…
Wagering mechanisms are one-shot betting mechanisms that elicit agents' predictions of an event. For deterministic wagering mechanisms, an existing impossibility result has shown incompatibility of some desirable theoretical properties. In…
We consider games of chance played by someone with external capital that cannot be applied to the game and determine how this affects risk-adjusted optimal betting. Specifically, we focus on Kelly optimization as a metric, optimizing the…
We consider a game-theoretic setting to model the interplay between attacker and defender in the context of information flow, and to reason about their optimal strategies. In contrast with standard game theory, in our games the utility of a…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…