Consider equipping an alphabet $mathcal{A}$ with a group action that partitions the set of words into equivalence classes which we call patterns. We answer standard questions for the Penneys game on patterns and show non-transitivity for the game on patterns as the length of the pattern tends to infinity. We also analyze bounds on the pattern-based Conway leading number and expected wait time, and further explore the game under the cyclic and symmetric group actions.
Penneys game is a two player zero-sum game in which each player chooses a three-flip pattern of heads and tails and the winner is the player whose pattern occurs first in repeated tosses of a fair coin. Because the players choose sequentially, the second mover has the advantage. In fact, for any three-flip pattern, there is another three-flip pattern that is strictly more likely to occur first. This paper provides a novel no-arbitrage argument that generates the winning odds corresponding to any pair of distinct patterns. The resulting odds formula is equivalent to that generated by Conways leading number algorithm. The accompanying betting odds intuition adds insight into why Conways algorithm works. The proof is simple and easy to generalize to games involving more than two outcomes, unequal probabilities, and competing patterns of various length. Additional results on the expected duration of Penneys game are presented. Code implementing and cross-validating the algorithms is included.
In this article, we consider involutions, called togglings, on the set of independent sets of the Dynkin diagram of type A, or a path graph. We are interested in the action of the subgroup of the symmetric group of the set of independent sets generated by togglings. We show that the subgroup coincides with the symmetric group.
Baker and Wang define the so-called Bernardi action of the sandpile group of a ribbon graph on the set of its spanning trees. This potentially depends on a fixed vertex of the graph but it is independent of the base vertex if and only if the ribbon structure is planar, moreover, in this case the Bernardi action is compatible with planar duality. Earlier, Chan, Church and Grochow and Chan, Glass, Macauley, Perkinson, Werner and Yang proved analogous results about the rotor-routing action. Baker and Wang moreover showed that the Bernardi and rotor-routing actions coincide for plane graphs. We clarify this still confounding picture by giving a canonical definition for the planar Bernardi/rotor-routing action, and also a canonical isomorphism between sandpile groups of planar dual graphs. Our canonical definition implies the compatibility with planar duality via an extremely short argument. We also show hidden symmetries of the problem by proving our results in the slightly more general setting of balanced plane digraphs. Any balanced plane digraph gives rise to a trinity, i.e., a triangulation of the sphere with a three-coloring of the $0$-simplices. Our most important tool is a group associated to trinities, introduced by Cavenagh and Wanless, and a result of a subset of the authors characterizing the Bernardi bijection in terms of a dissection of a root polytope.
In each round of the Namer-Claimer game, Namer names a distance d, then Claimer claims a subset of [n] that does not contain two points that differ by d. Claimer wins once they have claimed sets covering [n]. I show that the length of this game is of order log log n with optimal play from each side.