Related papers: Guess my number! From binary tricks to general bas…
We study the generalization of the game Lights Out in which the standard square grid board is replaced by a graph. We examine the probability that, when a graph is chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices and $e$…
This article concerns the resolution of impartial combinatorial games, and in particular games that can be split in sums of independent positions. We prove that in order to compute the outcome of a sum of independent positions, it is always…
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
We propose and analyse a 2-parameter family of 2-player games on two heaps of tokens, and present a strategy based on a class of sequences. The strategy looks easy, but is actually hard. A class of exotic numeration systems is then used,…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…
It is proved that in card games similar to 'Beggar-my-neighbour' the mathematical expectation of the playing time is finite, provided that the player who starts the round is determined randomly and the deck is shuffled when the trick is…
We define a \textit{cap} in the affine geometry $AG(n,2)$ to be a subset in which any collection of 4 points is in general position. In this paper we classify, up to affine equivalence, all caps in $AG(n,2)$ of size $k \leq 9$. As a result,…
The recent popularity of Wordle has revived interest in guessing games. We develop a general method for finding optimal strategies for guessing games while avoiding an exhaustive search. Our main contributions are several theorems that…
The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and…
We study two-player games with alternating moves played on infinite trees. Our main focus is on the case where the trees are full (regular) and the winning set is open (with respect to the product topology on the tree). Gale and Stewart…
In the distributional Twenty Questions game, Bob chooses a number $x$ from $1$ to $n$ according to a distribution $\mu$, and Alice (who knows $\mu$) attempts to identify $x$ using Yes/No questions, which Bob answers truthfully. Her goal is…
We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…
We define a natural equivalence relation on collections of cards from the card game SET, and enumerate some of the equivalence classes, vastly generalizing the standard game. On this basis, we describe several alternative games for the SET…
To keep card sorting with a lot of cards concise, a common strategy for gauging mental models involves presenting participants with fewer randomly selected cards instead of the full set. This is a decades-old practice, but its effects…
Mechanical shufflers used in many casinos employ a card shuffling scheme called \emph{shelf shuffling}. In a single-shelf shuffling, cards arrive sequentially, and each incoming card is independently placed on the top or the bottom of a…
For scientific computations on a digital computer the set of real number is usually approximated by a finite set F of "floating-point" numbers. We compare the numerical accuracy possible with difference choices of F having approximately the…
The regular number of a graph G denoted by reg(G) is the minimum number of subsets into which the edge set of G can be partitioned so that the subgraph induced by each subset is regular. In this work we answer to the problem posed as an…
Juggling patterns can be described by a sequence of cards which keep track of the relative order of the balls at each step. This interpretation has many algebraic and combinatorial properties, with connections to Stirling numbers, Dyck…
The well known binary and decimal representations of the integers, and other similar number systems, admit many generalisations. Here, we investigate whether still every integer could have a finite expansion on a given integer base b, when…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…