We present two collective games with new paradoxical features when they are combined. Besides reproducing the socalled Parrondo effect, where a winning game is obtained from the alternation of two fair games, there also exists a current inversion when varying the mixing probability between the games. We show that this is a new effect insofar one of the games is an unbiased random walk without i...

It has been shown that it is possible to construct two games that when played individually lose, but alternating randomly or deterministically between them can win. This apparent paradox has been dubbed “Parrondo’s paradox.” The original games are capital dependent, which means that the winning and losing probabilities depend on how much capital the player currently has. Recently, new games hav...

Testing tasks can be viewed (and organized!) as games against nature. We study reachability games in the context of testing. Such games are ubiquitous. A single industrial test suite may involve many instances of a reachability game. Hence the importance of optimal or near optimal strategies for reachability games. One can use linear programming or the value iteration method of Markov decision ...

Game theory [1] is a formalism for the study of competitive interaction in the rich spectrum of relationships ranging between conflict and cooperation. Originally conceived as a mathematical foundation of economics, it proved its robustness by providing new techniques and insights in logic and set theory [15, 13], evolutionary and population biology [22], auction design and implementation, the ...

In many agent-mediated electronic marketplaces, a facilitator is exploited to conduct matchmaking in finding agents with the same interests. During matchmaking, the consideration of newcomers and group matchmaking is crucial since favorable newcomers can bring preferable offers to the facilitator for generating better matches and hence maximizing the agents’ utility gains, furthermore, group ma...

Real-world planning problems often feature multiple sources of uncertainty, including randomness in outcomes, the presence of adversarial agents, and lack of complete knowledge of the world state. This thesis describes algorithms for four related formal models that can address multiple types of uncertainty: Markov decision processes, MDPs with adversarial costs, extensiveform games, and a new c...