Related papers: Bluffing in Scrabble
We consider the problem of finding a door along a wall with a blind robot that neither knows the distance to the door nor the direction towards of the door. This problem can be solved with the well-known doubling strategy yielding an…
We study the two-player safe game of Competitive Diffusion, a game-theoretic model for the diffusion of technologies or influence through a social network. In game theory, safe strategies are mixed strategies with a minimal expected gain…
Stochastic games are often used to model reactive processes. We consider the problem of synthesizing an optimal almost-sure winning strategy in a two-player (namely a system and its environment) turn-based stochastic game with both a…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
In imperfect information games (e.g. Bridge, Skat, Poker), one of the fundamental considerations is to infer the missing information while at the same time avoiding the disclosure of private information. Disregarding the issue of protecting…
AI research in chess has been primarily focused on producing stronger agents that can maximize the probability of winning. However, there is another aspect to chess that has largely gone unexamined: its aesthetic appeal. Specifically, there…
We calculated a fixed strategy that minimizes the average number of guesses (minimum strategy) for the number-guessing game MOO by exhaustive search. Although the minimum strategy for a similar game, mastermind, has been reported, this…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules which map the results of $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches and select a winner. Prior work designs simple tournament rules such that no pair of teams can manipulate the outcome of their match…
The article introduces a notion of a stochastic game with failure states and proposes two logical systems with modality "coalition has a strategy to transition to a non-failure state with a given probability while achieving a given goal."…
We consider how an agent should update her uncertainty when it is represented by a set P of probability distributions and the agent observes that a random variable X takes on value x, given that the agent makes decisions using the minimax…
The game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem) is a model for sequential decision making with a long history and many variations. The classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings are uniformly distributed.…
In a prediction tournament, contestants "forecast" by asserting a numerical probability for each of (say) 100 future real-world events. The scoring system is designed so that (regardless of the unknown true probabilities) more accurate…
A strategy for playing the game of roulette is presented in this paper. The strategy is based on the same probabilistic argument that leads to the well-known Birthday Paradox in Probability theory. Following the strategy, a player will have…
The Stackelberg game model, where a leader commits to a strategy and the follower best responds, has found widespread application, particularly to security problems. In the security setting, the goal is for the leader to compute an optimal…
We construct subgame-perfect equilibria with mixed strategies for symmetric stochastic timing games with arbitrary strategic incentives. The strategies are qualitatively different for local first- or second-mover advantages, which we…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
Much work in the parimutuel betting literature has discussed estimating event outcome probabilities or developing optimal wagering strategies, particularly for horse race betting. Some betting pools, however, involve betting not just on a…
We describe a randomized algorithm that, given a set $P$ of points in the plane, computes the best location to insert a new point $p$, such that the Delaunay triangulation of $P\cup\{p\}$ has the largest possible minimum angle. The expected…
The old adage says that it is better to be lucky than to be good, but when it comes to winning NCAA tournament pools, do you need to be both? This paper attempts to answer this question using data from the 2014 men's basketball tournament…
Mafia can be described as an experiment in human psychology and mass hysteria, or as a game between informed minority and uninformed majority. Focus on a very restricted setting, Mossel et al. [to appear in Ann. Appl. Probab. Volume 18,…