Related papers: The Kruskal Count
The Stochastic Abacus is can employed to compute winning probabilities for each vertex of a rooted tree in the game "Pass the Buck", with the starting vertex being the root of the tree. For all but the simplest trees, the abacus can't…
In a game of permutation wordle, a player attempts to guess a secret permutation in the fewest number of guesses possible. Previously, Samuel Kutin and Lawren Smithline (arXiv:2408.00903) introduced this game and proposed a strategy called…
The Gumbel trick is a method to sample from a discrete probability distribution, or to estimate its normalizing partition function. The method relies on repeatedly applying a random perturbation to the distribution in a particular way, each…
We consider the following card guessing game with no feedback. An ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards. One after…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
Stefan Mandel is said to have won the lottery 14 times. He never disclosed the recipe he called combinatorial condensation, which enabled him to hit the Romanian lottery jackpot in the early phase of his betting career. Combinatorial…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
The recognition and clustering of coins which have been struck by the same die is of interest for archeological studies. Nowadays, this work can only be performed by experts and is very tedious. In this paper, we propose a method to…
The Card-Cyclic-to-Random shuffle on $n$ cards is defined as follows: at time $t$ remove the card with label $t$ mod $n$ and randomly reinsert it back into the deck. Pinsky introduced this shuffle and asked how many steps are needed to mix…
The deduction game is a variation of the game of cops and robber on graphs in which searchers must capture an invisible evader in at most one move. Searchers know each others' initial locations, but can only communicate if they are on the…
We use the Chebyshev knot diagram model of Koseleff and Pecker in order to introduce a random knot diagram model by assigning the crossings to be positive or negative uniformly at random. We give a formula for the probability of choosing a…
Finding a counterfeit coin with the different weight from a set of visually identical coin using a balance, usually a two-armed balance, known as the balance question, is an intersting and inspiring question. Its variants involve…
This paper considers the effect of riffle shuffling on decks of cards, allowing for some cards to be indistinguishable from other cards. The dual problem of dealing a game with hands, such as bridge or poker, is also considered. The…
The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…
Assume that letters (from a finite alphabet) in a text form a Markov chain. We track two distinct words, $U$ and $D$. A gambler gains 1 point for each occurrence of $U$ (including overlapping occurrences) and loses 1 point for each…
In this article, we look at a hat-guessing game, in which each player must guess the color of their own hat while only seeing the hats of the other players. We focus on the case of two hat colors and a countably infinite number of players.…
A decision maker observes the evolving state of the world while constantly trying to predict the next state given the history of past states. The ability to benefit from such predictions depends not only on the ability to recognize patters…
We study the cutoff phenomenon for generalized riffle shuffles where, at each step, the deck of cards is cut into a random number of packs of multinomial sizes which are then riffled together.
We present a convenient trick for computing the sizes of clusters within a network. The rationale relies on the mathematics of the geometric series and the fundamental matrix of a Markov Chain.
Guessing games for directed graphs were introduced by Riis for studying multiple unicast network coding problems. In a guessing game, the players toss generalised dice and can see some of the other outcomes depending on the structure of an…