Related papers: New directions in enumerative chess problems
We introduce a family of univariate polynomials indexed by integer partitions. At prime powers, they count the number of subspaces in a finite vector space that transform under a regular diagonal matrix in a specified manner. This…
The class of Guaranteed Scoring Games (GS) are two-player combinatorial games with the property that Normal-play games (Conway et. al.) are ordered embedded into GS. They include, as subclasses, the scoring games considered by Milnor…
We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…
We study the inverse power index problem for weighted voting games: the problem of finding a weighted voting game in which the power of the players is as close as possible to a certain target distribution. Our goal is to find algorithms…
We consider two-player random extensive form games where the payoffs at the leaves are independently drawn uniformly at random from a given feasible set C. We study the asymptotic distribution of the subgame perfect equilibrium outcome for…
The study of pinnacle sets has been a recent area of interest in combinatorics. Given a permutation, its pinnacle set is the set of all values larger than the values on either side of it. Largely inspired by conjectures posed by Davis,…
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…
In this paper we study a single player game consisting of $n$ black checkers and $m$ white checkers, called shifting the checkers. We have proved that the minimum number of steps needed to play the game for general $n$ and $m$ is $nm + n +…
This paper studies the counting problem in random dynamical systems. We noticed that the nature of counting in the random setting is completely different than that of the deterministic systems in the sense that non-exponential growth is…
Seriation methods order a set of descriptions given some criterion (e.g., unimodality or minimum distance between similarity scores). Seriation is thus inherently a problem of finding the optimal solution among a set of permutations of…
The problem of guessing subject to distortion is considered, and the performance of randomized guessing strategies is investigated. A one-shot achievability bound on the guessing moment (i.e., moment of the number of required queries) is…
We consider the problem of enumeration of planar maps and revisit its one-matrix model solution in the light of recent combinatorial techniques involving conjugated trees. We adapt and generalize these techniques so as to give an…
In the present paper we consider one class of zero-sum games with discontinuous payoffs which may have no solutions in the sets of pure or mixed strategies. We show that, however, the solution always exists in the set of so-called $\mathcal…
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…
The reversible pebble game is a combinatorial game played on rooted DAGs. This game was introduced by Bennett (1989) motivated by applications in designing space efficient reversible algorithms. Recently, Chan (2013) showed that the…
We study sorting by queues that can rearrange their content by applying permutations from a predefined set. These new sorting devices are called shuffle queues and we investigate those of them corresponding to sets of permutations defining…
Imitation is simple behavior which uses successful actions of others in order to deal with one's own problems. Because success of imitation generally depends on whether profit of an imitating agent coincides with those of other agents or…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
It is rigorously proved that quasilinear impulsive systems possess unpredictable solutions when a perturbation generated by an unpredictable sequence is applied. The existence, uniqueness, as well as asymptotic stability of such solutions…