Related papers: The Kruskal Count
The following problem is considered. Two players are each required to allocate a quota of~$n$ counters among~$k$ boxes labelled~$1,2,\ldots,k$. At times $t=1,2,3,\ldots$ a random box is identified; the probability of choosing box~$i$…
Computer calculations for most exact expected values in blackjack have been available since the 1960's, but exact results for pair splitting and resplitting have previously been too computer intensive. This paper describes a new algorithm…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the popular Tic-Tac-Toe game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields," with each field constituting its own miniature tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player must…
A cost Markov chain is a Markov chain whose transitions are labelled with non-negative integer costs. A fundamental problem on this model, with applications in the verification of stochastic systems, is to compute information about the…
The Gumbel-max trick is a method to draw a sample from a categorical distribution, given by its unnormalized (log-)probabilities. Over the past years, the machine learning community has proposed several extensions of this trick to…
Drafting, i.e., the selection of a subset of items from a larger candidate set, is a key element of many games and related problems. It encompasses team formation in sports or e-sports, as well as deck selection in many modern card games.…
Kriging based on Gaussian random fields is widely used in reconstructing unknown functions. The kriging method has pointwise predictive distributions which are computationally simple. However, in many applications one would like to predict…
In the Russian cards problem, Alice, Bob and Cath draw $a$, $b$ and $c$ cards, respectively, from a publicly known deck. Alice and Bob must then communicate their cards to each other without Cath learning who holds a single card. Solutions…
Given a finite nonempty sequence of integers S, by grouping adjacent terms it is always possible to write it, possibly in many ways, as S = X Y^k, where X and Y are sequences and Y is nonempty. Choose the version which maximizes the value…
We show that for every fixed non-negative integer k there is a quadratic time algorithm that decides whether a given graph has crossing number at most k and, if this is the case, computes a drawing of the graph in the plane with at most k…
Some Magic Tricks (MT), such as many kinds of Card Magic (CM), consisting of human computational or logical actions. How to ensure the logical correctness of these MTs? In this paper, the Model Checking (MC) technique is employed to study a…
We analyze the following general version of the deterministic Hats game. Several sages wearing colored hats occupy the vertices of a graph. Each sage can have a hat of one of $k$ colors. Each sage tries to guess the color of his own hat…
A strategy for playing the game of roulette is presented in this paper. The strategy is based on the same probabilistic argument that leads to the well-known Birthday Paradox in Probability theory. Following the strategy, a player will have…
We generalize the well-known Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) in combinatorics. Our problem is to find the minimum and expected number of draws, with replacement, required to recover $n$ distinctly labeled coupons, with each draw consisting…
A positive integer $k$ is called a magic constant if there is a graph $G$ along with a bijective function $f$ from $V(G)$ to first $|V(G)|$ natural numbers such that the weight of the vertex $w(v) = \sum_{uv \in E}f(v) =k$ for all $v \in…
The guessing game introduced by Riis is a variant of the "guessing your own hats" game and can be played on any simple directed graph G on n vertices. For each digraph G, it is proved that there exists a unique guessing number gn(G)…
In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…
We present a Monte Carlo simulation study of the Bhikar-Sawkar card game, a non-deterministic game structurally similar to the classic Beggar-My-Neighbour, which is fully deterministic. Although both games share a common setup, key…
Left, Center, Right is a popular dice game. We analyze the game using Markov chain and Monte Carlo methods. We compute the expected game length for two to eight players and determine the probability of winning for each player in the game.…
Consider the following method of card shuffling. Start with a deck of $N$ cards numbered 1 through N. Fix a parameter $p$ between 0 and 1. In this model a ``shuffle'' consists of uniformly selecting a pair of adjacent cards and then…