Related papers: Coin-Moving Puzzles
We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…
In this paper we provide a case study of the use of relatively sophisticated mathematics and algorithms to redefine and adapt a simple traditional game/puzzle to exploit the computational power of smart devices. The focus here is not so…
Coin flipping is a cryptographic primitive in which two distrustful parties wish to generate a random bit in order to choose between two alternatives. This task is impossible to realize when it relies solely on the asynchronous exchange of…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
We analyze a coin-based game with two players where, before starting the game, each player selects a string of length $n$ comprised of coin tosses. They alternate turns, choosing the outcome of a coin toss according to specific rules. As a…
We consider 2-player zero-sum stochastic games where each player controls his own state variable living in a compact metric space. The terminology comes from gambling problems where the state of a player represents its wealth in a casino.…
The Parks Puzzle is a paper-and-pencil puzzle game that is classically played on a square grid with different colored regions (the parks). The player needs to place a certain number of "trees" in each row, column, and park such that none…
Capacitated network bargaining games are popular combinatorial games that involve the structure of matchings in graphs. We show that it is always possible to stabilize unit-weight instances of this problem (that is, ensure that they admit a…
We investigate the computation of equilibria in extensive-form games where ex ante correlation is possible, focusing on correlated equilibria requiring the least amount of communication between the players and the mediator. Motivated by the…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
In this paper, we introduce a family of games called concave pro-rata games. In such a game, players place their assets into a pool, and the pool pays out some concave function of all assets placed into it. Each player then receives a…
This paper introduces alignment games, a new class of zero-sum games modeling strategic interventions where effectiveness depends on alignment with an underlying hidden state. Motivated by operational problems in medical diagnostics,…
The class of passable games was recently introduced by Selinger as a class of combinatorial games that are suitable for modelling monotone set coloring games such as Hex. In a monotone set coloring game, the players alternately color the…
We consider generalizations of the familiar fifteen-piece sliding puzzle on the 4 by 4 square grid. On larger grids with more pieces and more holes, asymptotically how fast can we move the puzzle into the solved state? We also give a…
Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…
A matching game is a cooperative profit game defined on an edge-weighted graph, where the players are the vertices and the profit of a coalition is the maximum weight of matchings in the subgraph induced by the coalition. A population…
Synchronous linear constraint system games are nonlocal games that verify whether or not two players share a solution to a given system of equations. Two algebraic objects associated to these games encode information about the existence of…
This paper has two central aims: first, to provide simple conditions under which the generalized games in choice form and, consequently, the abstract economies, admit equilibrium; second, to study the solvability of several types of systems…
Suppose that a train is running along a railway network, starting from a designated origin, with the goal of reaching a designated destination. The network, however, is of a special nature: every time the train traverses a switch, the…
We investigate coin-flipping protocols for multiple parties in a quantum broadcast setting: (1) We propose and motivate a definition for quantum broadcast. Our model of quantum broadcast channel is new. (2) We discovered that quantum…