Related papers: Guess my number! From binary tricks to general bas…
We prove an optimal strategy for the children's game Guess Who? assuming the official rules are in use and that both players ask `classical' questions with a bipartite response. Applying a technique described in [Rabern, B \& Rabern, L…
In graph pegging, we view each vertex of a graph as a hole into which a peg can be placed, with checker-like ``pegging moves'' allowed. Motivated by well-studied questions in graph pebbling, we introduce two pegging quantities. The pegging…
We consider games played on finite graphs, whose goal is to obtain a trace belonging to a given set of winning traces. We focus on those states from which Player 1 cannot force a win. We explore and compare several criteria for establishing…
In this short paper we study the game of Cops and Robbers, played on the vertices of some fixed graph $G$ of order $n$. The minimum number of cops required to capture a robber is called the cop number of $G$. We show that the cop number of…
In this paper, we study some cards shuffles which are used by magicians. We focus ourselves on the possibility to hit eventually the initial state after several shuffles. This is a classical problem arising in discrete dynamical systems.…
The guessing game introduced by Riis is a variant of the "guessing your own hats" game and can be played on any simple directed graph G on n vertices. For each digraph G, it is proved that there exists a unique guessing number gn(G)…
We introduce GuessWhat?!, a two-player guessing game as a testbed for research on the interplay of computer vision and dialogue systems. The goal of the game is to locate an unknown object in a rich image scene by asking a sequence of…
The 21-card trick is a way of dealing cards in order to predict the card selected by a volunteer. We give a mathematical explanation of why the well-known 21-card trick works using a simple linear discrete function. The function has a…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
We discuss winning possibilities of players in various variants of cops and robber game played on large random graphs, a testbed for various kinds of network queries, search problems in particular. We explore the use of logic frameworks to…
Every quadratic form represents 0; therefore, if we take any number of quadratic forms and ask which integers are simultaneously represented by all members of the collection, we are guaranteed a nonempty set. But when is that set more than…
We consider Upper Domination, the problem of finding the minimal dominating set of maximum cardinality. Very few exact algorithms have been described for solving Upper Domination. In particular, no binary programming formulations for Upper…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
In card games, in casino games with multiple decks of cards and in cryptography, one is sometimes faced with the following problem: how can a human (as opposed to a computer) shuffle a large deck of cards? The procedure we study is to break…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire played on a computer. Two popular board shapes are the 33-hole cross-shaped board, and the 15-hole triangle board---we use them as examples throughout. The basic game begins from a full board…
Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…
We define the cover number of a graph $G$ by a graph class $\mathcal P$ as the minimum number of graphs of class $\mathcal P$ required to cover the edge set of $G$. Taking inspiration from a paper by Harary, Hsu and Miller, we find an exact…
We discuss variations of the zero-sum game where Bob selects two distinct numbers, and Alice learns one of them to make a guess which of the numbers is the larger.
The domatic number of a graph is the maximum number of pairwise disjoint dominating sets admitted by the graph. We introduce a game based around this graph invariant. The domatic number game is played on a graph $G$ by two players, Alice…
We study the entanglement game, which is a version of cops and robbers, on sparse graphs. While the minimum degree of a graph G is a lower bound for the number of cops needed to catch a robber in G, we show that the required number of cops…