Related papers: The Kruskal Count
Mechanisms for the automation of uncertainty are required for expert systems. Sometimes these mechanisms need to obey the properties of probabilistic reasoning. A purely numeric mechanism, like those proposed so far, cannot provide a…
Mirror games were invented by Garg and Schnieder (ITCS 2019). Alice and Bob take turns (with Alice playing first) in declaring numbers from the set {1,2, ...2n}. If a player picks a number that was previously played, that player loses and…
Kriging and Gaussian Process Regression are statistical methods that allow predicting the outcome of a random process or a random field by using a sample of correlated observations. In other words, the random process or random field is…
The Secret Santa ritual, where in a group of people every member presents a gift to a randomly assigned partner, poses a combinatorial problem when considering the probabilities involved in the formation of pairs, where two persons exchange…
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.…
This article, based on a talk, treats some elementary, but not completely simple examples from probability. They concern multiple birthday coincidences, throwing dice, the combinatorics of the German card game "Doppelkopf", and the…
The Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) is a well-known combinatorial problem that seeks to estimate the number of random draws required to complete a collection of $n$ distinct coupon types. Various generalizations of this problem have been…
The function that counts the number of ways to place nonattacking identical chess or fairy chess pieces in a rectangular strip of fixed height and variable width, as a function of the width, is a piecewise polynomial which is eventually a…
Jigsaw percolation is a nonlocal process that iteratively merges connected clusters in a deterministic "puzzle graph" by using connectivity properties of a random "people graph" on the same set of vertices. We presume the Erdos--Renyi…
Consider a permutation $\sigma\in S_n$ as a deck of cards numbered from 1 to $n$ and laid out in a row, where $\sigma_j$ denotes the number of the card that is in the $j$-th position from the left.\rm\ We study some probabilistic and…
There are 134,459 distinct initial hands at the video poker game Jacks or Better, taking suit exchangeability into account. A computer program can determine the optimal strategy (i.e., which cards to hold) for each such hand, but a complete…
To approximate the trajectories of a stochastic process by the solution of some differential equation is widely used in the fields of probability, computer science and combinatorics. In this paper, the convergence of coupon collecting…
In this work we present a detailed analysis using the Markov chain theory of some versions of the truel game in which three players try to eliminate each other in a series of one-to-one competitions, using the rules of the game. Besides…
We introduce a guessing game, permutation Wordle, in which a guesser attempts to recover a hidden permutation in $S_n$. In each round, the guesser guesses a permutation (using information from previous rounds) and is told which entries of…
Bridge is a trick-taking card game requiring the ability to evaluate probabilities since it is a game of incomplete information where each player only sees its cards. In order to choose a strategy, a player needs to gather information about…
Fraudulent activities are an expensive problem for many financial institutions, costing billions of dollars to corporations annually. More commonly occurring activities in this regard are credit card frauds. In this context, the credit card…
TThe problem is to identify a probability associated with a set of natural numbers, given an infinite data sequence of elements from the set. If the given sequence is drawn i.i.d. and the probability mass function involved (the target)…
New algorithms for generating closed knight's tours are obtained by generating a vertex-disjoint cycle cover of the knight's graph and joining the resulting cycles. It is shown experimentally that these algorithms are significantly faster…
Dice odds in the board game RISK were first investigated by Tan, fixed by Osbourne, and extended by Blatt. We generalized dice odds further, varying the number of sides and the number of dice used in a single battle. We show that the…
It is proved that in card games similar to 'Beggar-my-neighbour' the mathematical expectation of the playing time is finite, provided that the player who starts the round is determined randomly and the deck is shuffled when the trick is…