Related papers: Quantifying Skill and Chance: A Unified Framework …
This paper presents a data-driven statistical framework to quantify the role of skill in games, addressing the long-standing question of whether success in a game is predominantly driven by skill or chance. We analyze player level data from…
Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
We develop a flexible stochastic approximation framework for analyzing the long-run behavior of learning in games (both continuous and finite). The proposed analysis template incorporates a wide array of popular learning algorithms,…
In fantasy sports, strategic thinking-not mere luck-often defines who wins and who falls short. As fantasy cricket grows in popularity across India, understanding whether success stems from skill or chance has become both an analytical and…
In this paper, I formalize intelligence measurement in games by introducing mechanisms that assign a real number -- interpreted as an intelligence score -- to each player in a game. This score quantifies the ex-post strategic ability of the…
"The chance to win given a certain move" is an easily obtainable quantity from data and often quoted in gaming statistics. It is also the fundamental quantity that reinforcement learning AI bases on. Unfortunately, this conditional…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning the skill distribution of a population of agents from observations of pairwise games in a tournament. These games are played among randomly drawn agents from the population. The agents in our…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player zero-sum graph games with a reachability objective. The problem is to compute the winning probability as well as the optimal strategies of both players. In this paper, we compare the three…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player zero-sum graph games with a reachability objective. The problem is to compute the winning probability as well as the optimal strategies of both players. In this paper, we compare the three…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…
The paper aims to investigate the degree of cognitive skills required for success in online versions of the popular card game rummy and poker. The study focuses on analyzing the impact of experience and learnable skills on success in the…
Gauging an individual's skill level is crucial, as it inherently shapes their behavior. Quantifying skill, however, is challenging because it is latent to the observed actions. To explore skill understanding in human behavior, we focus on…
We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…
We introduce a compact probabilistic model for two-player and two-team (four-player) squash matches, along with a practical skill-comparison rule derived from point-scoring probabilities. Using recorded shot types and court locations, we…
Rating systems play a crucial role in evaluating player skill across competitive environments. The Elo rating system, originally designed for deterministic and information-complete games such as chess, has been widely adopted and modified…
Poker is a landmark challenge for artificial intelligence. The dominant approach relies on equilibrium solvers built on counterfactual regret minimization, requiring millions of core-hours of training. Large Language Models (LLMs) possess…
Cheating in chess, by using advice from powerful software, has become a major problem, reaching the highest levels. As opposed to the large majority of previous work, which concerned {\em detection} of cheating, here we try to evaluate the…
$S$ equilibrium synthesizes a century of game-theoretic modeling. $S$-beliefs determine choices as in the refinement literature and level-$k$, without anchoring on Nash equilibrium or imposing ad hoc belief formation. $S$-choices allow for…