Related papers: Counting Knight's Tours through the Randomized War…
This work focuses on the analysis of Chess 960, also known as Fischer Random Chess, a variant of traditional chess where the starting positions of the pieces are randomized. The study aims to predict the game outcome using machine learning…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…
Inspired by the increasing popularity of Swiss-system tournaments in sports, we study the problem of predetermining the number of rounds that can be guaranteed in a Swiss-system tournament. Matches of these tournaments are usually…
Unlike repetitions in Western Chess where all repetitions are draws, repetitions in Chinese Chess could result in a win, draw, or loss depending on the kind of repetition being made by both players. One of the biggest hurdles facing Chinese…
We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and…
Random walks on graphs can be slow. To speed them up, imagine that at each step instead of choosing the neighbor at random, there is a small probability $\varepsilon>0$ that we can choose it. We show that in this case, at least for graphs…
We compute the mixing rate of a non-backtracking random walk on a regular expander. Using some properties of Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind, we show that this rate may be up to twice as fast as the mixing rate of the simple random…
A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…
We introduce a new type of card shuffle called one-sided transpositions. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric…
The gambler's ruin problem for correlated random walks (CRW), both with and without delays, is addressed using the Optional Stopping Theorem for martingales. We derive closed-form expressions for the ruin probabilities and the expected game…
In this note, we design a discrete random walk on the real line which takes steps $0, \pm 1$ (and one with steps in $\{\pm 1, 2\}$) where at least $96\%$ of the signs are $\pm 1$ in expectation, and which has $\mathcal{N}(0,1)$ as a…
We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…
A finite ergodic Markov chain is said to exhibit cutoff if its distance to stationarity remains close to 1 over a certain number of iterations and then abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Discovered in the context of card…
A whirling knight's tour is a Hamiltonian cycle in the digraph of counter-clockwise knight steps about the centre of an $n \times n$ board; its coil count $c$ is the winding number around the centre. We prove that no such tour with $c =…
Repetition-based draw rules in deterministic games like chess ensure termination but introduce strategic artifacts, allowing players to enforce draws independent of positional value. We propose an asymmetric modification: threefold…
We used the random walk to model the problem of reserves. The classic case of a stochastic process is the example of random walks, which are used to study a set of phenomena and, particularly, as in this article, models of reserves…
Real-time heuristic search algorithms are suitable for situated agents that need to make their decisions in constant time. Since the original work by Korf nearly two decades ago, numerous extensions have been suggested. One of the most…
We study the enumeration of different classes of grand knight's paths in the plane. In particular, we focus on the subsets of zigzag knight's paths that are subject to constraints. These constraints include ending at $y$-coordinate 0,…
There have been several popular reports of various groups exploiting the deterministic nature of the game of roulette for profit. Moreover, through its history the inherent determinism in the game of roulette has attracted the attention of…