Abstract During the last years, several card-based Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocols for Nikoli’s puzzles have been designed. Although there are relatively simple ZKP a number of puzzles, such as Sudoku and Kakuro, some face difficulties in designing protocols. For example, Slitherlink requires novel elaborate techniques to construct protocol. In this study, we focus on three Nikoli puzzles:...

Three major puzzles, described later in this section, have captured the attention of macroeconomic finance: the equity-premium, riskfreerate and equity-volatility puzzles. A common strand of these three asset-return puzzles is that markets are behaving as if investors fear some unknown hidden randomness that isn’t obvious from the data. People are acting in the aggregate like there is much more...

It has been observed in recent neuroimaging studies that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is involved in the insightful solving of puzzles. Yet, the exact function of the ACC in insight is not clear. In this event-related fMRI study, we compared the neural correlates of the solving of two kinds of puzzles. In Condition A, the subjects solved a list of puzzles that were constructed by differe...

Recently permutation multimedia ciphers were broken in a chosen-plaintext scenario. That attack models a very resourceful adversary which may not always be the case. To show insecurity of these ciphers, we present a cipher-text only attack on speech permutation ciphers. We show inherent redundancies of speech can pave the path for a successful cipher-text only attack. To that end, regularities ...

Many classical puzzles involve hats. The general setting for these puzzles is a game in which several players are each given a hat to wear. Associated with each hat is either a color or a number. Every player can see the color or number of everyone else’s hat but not his own. The players are then trying to figure out the colors or the numbers on their own hats. The Three-Hat Problem is one of s...