Related papers: A Permutation Avoidance Game with Reverse Replies …
We study the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays and a budget constraint for both the stochastic and the adversarial setting. At each round, exactly $K$ out of $N$ possible arms have to be played (with $1\leq K \leq N$). In…
Poker is a challenging problem for artificial intelligence, with non-deterministic dynamics, partial observability, and the added difficulty of unknown adversaries. Modelling all of the uncertainties in this domain is not an easy task. In…
Infinitely repeated games can support cooperative outcomes that are not equilibria in the one-shot game. The idea is to make sure that any gains from deviating will be offset by retaliation in future rounds. However, this model of…
We characterize the assignment games which admit a population monotonic allocation scheme (PMAS) in terms of efficiently verifiable structural properties of the nonnegative matrix that induces the game. We prove that an assignment game is…
Burke and Teng introduced a two-player combinatorial game Atropos based on Sperner's lemma, and showed that deciding whether one has a winning strategy for Atropos is PSPACE-complete. In the original Atropos game, the players must color a…
The multi-armed bandit is a concise model for the problem of iterated decision-making under uncertainty. In each round, a gambler must pull one of $K$ arms of a slot machine, without any foreknowledge of their payouts, except that they are…
Evolutionary game theory is a powerful mathematical framework to study how intelligent individuals adjust their strategies in collective interactions. It has been widely believed that it is impossible to unilaterally control players'…
The "pancake problem" asks how many prefix reversals are sufficient to sort any permutation $\pi \in \mathcal{S}_k$ to the identity. We write $f(k)$ to denote this quantity. The best known bounds are that $\frac{15}{14}k -O(1) \le f(k)\le…
The famous theorem of R.Aumann and M.Maschler states that the sequence of values of an N-stage zero-sum game G_N with incomplete information on one side converges as N tends to infinity, and the error term is bounded by a constant divided…
Consider a two-player game repeated N times. Player 1 can choose between two styles (for interpretability, offensive and defensive), whereas Player 2 uses a single fixed style. Let X N\,:= \#wins -\#losses for Player 1 after N games, and…
In this paper, we study the problem of bandits with knapsacks (BwK) in a non-stationary environment. The BwK problem generalizes the multi-arm bandit (MAB) problem to model the resource consumption associated with playing each arm. At each…
Pattern avoidance is a central topic in graph theory and combinatorics. Pattern avoidance in matrices has applications in computer science and engineering, such as robot motion planning and VLSI circuit design. A $d$-dimensional zero-one…
We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…
We study the complexity of the decision problem known as Permutation Pattern Matching, or PPM. The input of PPM consists of a pair of permutations $\tau$ (the `text') and $\pi$ (the `pattern'), and the goal is to decide whether $\tau$…
Blackjack or "21" is a popular card-based game of chance and skill. The objective of the game is to win by obtaining a hand total higher than the dealer's without exceeding 21. The ideal blackjack strategy will maximize financial return in…
We consider the distributions of the lengths of the longest monotone and alternating subsequences in classes of permutations of size $n$ that avoid a specific pattern or set of patterns, with respect to the uniform distribution on each such…
We develop value iteration-based algorithms to solve in a unified manner different classes of combinatorial zero-sum games with mean-payoff type rewards. These algorithms rely on an oracle, evaluating the dynamic programming operator up to…
The existential k-pebble game characterizes the expressive power of the existential-positive k-variable fragment of first-order logic on finite structures. The winner of the existential k-pebble game on two given finite structures can be…
Recently, Babson and Steingrimsson have introduced generalised permutation patterns that allow the requirement that two adjacent letters in a pattern must be adjacent in the permutation. We consider pattern avoidance for such patterns, and…
Given permutations $\sigma \in S_k$ and $\pi \in S_n$ with $k<n$, the \emph{pattern matching} problem is to decide whether $\pi$ matches $\sigma$ as an order-isomorphic subsequence. We give a linear-time algorithm in case both $\pi$ and…