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Cheating in chess, by using advice from powerful software, has become a major problem, reaching the highest levels. As opposed to the large majority of previous work, which concerned {\em detection} of cheating, here we try to evaluate the…
From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…
We present an $O(nrG)$ time algorithm for computing and maintaining a minimum length shortest watchman tour that sees a simple polygon under monotone visibility in direction $\theta$, while $\theta$ varies in $[0,180^{\circ})$, obtaining…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
Quantitative measures of randomness in games are useful for game design and have implications for gambling law. We treat the outcome of a game as a random variable and derive a closed-form expression and estimator for the variance in the…
The opening book is an important component of a chess engine, and thus computer chess programmers have been developing automated methods to improve the quality of their books. For chess, which has a very rich opening theory, large databases…
The rotor walk is a derandomized version of the random walk on a graph. On successive visits to any given vertex, the walker is routed to each of the neighboring vertices in some fixed cyclic order, rather than to a random sequence of…
We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
Random walk centrality is a fundamental metric in graph mining for quantifying node importance and influence, defined as the weighted average of hitting times to a node from all other nodes. Despite its ability to capture rich graph…
Elephant random walk is a special type of random walk that incorporates the memory of the past to determine its future steps. The probability of this walk taking a particular step (+1 or -1) at a time point, conditioned on the entire…
We establish via a probabilistic approach the quenched invariance principle for a class of long range random walks in independent (but not necessarily identically distributed) balanced random environments, with the transition probability…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
We study an exactly solvable random walk model with long-range memory on arbitrary networks. The walker performs unbiased random steps to nearest-neighbor nodes and intermittently resets to previously visited nodes in a preferential way,…
On the n x n chessboard, the move totals of distinct pieces satisfy a small number of striking arithmetic identities. The total diagonal mobility of the bishop and the total 8-neighbor mobility of the king are exactly proportional, with…
The graph obtained from the integer grid Z x Z by the removal of all horizontal edges that do not belong to the x-axis is called a comb. In a random walk on a graph, whenever a walker is at a vertex v, in the next step it will visit one of…
The Abstract Milling problem is a natural and quite general graph-theoretic model for geometric milling problems. Given a graph, one asks for a walk that covers all its vertices with a minimum number of turns, as specified in the graph…
Motivated by a problem in the theory of randomized search heuristics, we give a very precise analysis for the coupon collector problem where the collector starts with a random set of coupons (chosen uniformly from all sets). We show that…
Walk on stars (WoSt) has shown its power in being applied to Monte Carlo methods for solving partial differential equations, but the sampling techniques in WoSt are not satisfactory, leading to high variance. We propose a guiding-based…
We model stochastic choice as environment-dependent switching among a small library of deterministic decision rules. A Random Rule Model generates menu-level choice probabilities via named, interpretable rules weighted by observable menu…