Related papers: How to Beat Capablanca
We study the positional game where two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately select respectively $1$ and $b$ previously unclaimed edges of $K_n$. Maker wins if she succeeds in claiming all edges of some odd cycle in $K_n$ and Breaker wins…
We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…
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 give a method to transform into programs, classical proofs using a well ordering of the reals. The technics uses a generalization of Cohen's forcing and the theory of classical realizability introduced by the author.
New combinatorial games are introduced, of which the most pertinent is Maharaja Nim. The rules extend those of the well-known impartial game of Wythoff Nim in which two players take turn in moving a single Queen of Chess on a large board,…
Given an inner model $W \subset V$ and a regular cardinal $\kappa$, we consider two alternatives for adding a subset to $\kappa$ by forcing: the Cohen poset $Add(\kappa,1)$, and the Cohen poset of the inner model $Add(\kappa,1)^W$. The…
This expository paper, aimed at the reader without much background in set theory or logic, gives an overview of Cohen's proof (via forcing) of the independence of the continuum hypothesis. It emphasizes the broad outlines and the intuitive…
Consider an n by n array of cards shuffled in the following manner. An element x of the array is chosen uniformly at random; Then with probability 1/2 the rectangle of cards above and to the left of x is rotated 180 degrees, and with…
Number the cells of a (possibly infinite) chessboard in some way with the numbers 0, 1, 2, ... Consider the cells in order, placing a queen in a cell if and only if it would not attack any earlier queen. The problem is to determine the…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
The purpose of this article is to give a presentation of the method of forcing aimed at someone with a minimal knowledge of set theory and logic. The emphasis will be on how the method can be used to prove theorems in ZFC.
In this paper, we model one-day international cricket games as Markov processes, applying forward and inverse Reinforcement Learning (RL) to develop three novel tools for the game. First, we apply Monte-Carlo learning to fit a nonlinear…
We present a formalism that captures the process of proving quantum superiority to skeptics as an interactive game between two agents, supervised by a referee. Bob, is sampling from a classical distribution on a quantum device that is…
Risk is a well-known turn based board game where the primary objective is nothing less than the world domination. Gameplay is based on battles between armies located in adjacent territories on the map of Earth. The combat's outcome is…
Briscola is a traditional Italian trick-taking card game whose simplest form is played by two players. Popular folklore credits victory almost entirely to the player who is dealt more cards of the trump suit (the so-called \emph{briscola}),…
We discuss winning possibilities of players in various variants of cops and robber game played on large random graphs, a testbed for various kinds of network queries, search problems in particular. We explore the use of logic frameworks to…
In the tournament game two players, called Maker and Breaker, alternately take turns in claiming an unclaimed edge of the complete graph on n vertices and selecting one of the two possible orientations. Before the game starts, Breaker fixes…
This work is concerned with the rating of players/teams in face-to-face games with three possible outcomes: loss, win, and draw. This is one of the fundamental problems in sport analytics, where the very simple and popular, non-trivial…
By now, the Maker-Breaker connectivity game on a complete graph $K_n$ or on a random graph $G\sim G_{n,p}$ is well studied. Recently, London and Pluh\'ar suggested a variant in which Maker always needs to choose her edges in such a way that…
In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…