{"title":"A Probabilistic Approach to the Game of Guessing in a Random\u0000Environment","authors":"A. P. Kovalevskii","doi":"10.1134/S1990478924010071","DOIUrl":"10.1134/S1990478924010071","url":null,"abstract":"<p> The following game of two persons is formalized and solved in the paper. Player 1 is asked\u0000a question. Player 2 knows the correct answer. Moreover, both players know all possible answers\u0000and their a priori probabilities. Player 2 must choose a subset of the given cardinality of deception\u0000answers. Player 1 chooses one of the proposed answers. Player 1 wins one from Player 2 if he/she\u0000guessed the correct answer and zero otherwise. This game is reduced to a matrix game. However,\u0000the game matrix is of large dimension, so the classical method based on solving a pair of dual\u0000linear programming problems cannot be implemented for each individual problem. Therefore, it is\u0000necessary to develop a method to radically reduce the dimension.\u0000</p><p>The whole set of such games is divided into two classes. The superuniform class of\u0000games is characterized by the condition that the largest of the a priori probabilities is greater than\u0000the probability of choosing an answer at random, and the subuniform class corresponds to the\u0000opposite inequality—each of the a priori probabilities when multiplied by the total number\u0000of answers presented to Player 1 does not exceed one. For each of these two classes, the solving\u0000the extended matrix game is reduced to solving a linear programming problem of a much smaller\u0000dimension. For the subuniform class, the game is reformulated in terms of probability theory. The\u0000condition for the optimality of a mixed strategy is formulated using the Bayes theorem. For the\u0000superuniform class, the solution of the game uses an auxiliary problem related to the subuniform\u0000class. For both classes, we prove results on the probabilities of guessing the correct answer when\u0000using optimal mixed strategies by both players. We present algorithms for obtaining these\u0000strategies. The optimal mixed strategy of Player 1 is to choose an answer at random in the\u0000subuniform class and to choose the most probable answer in the superuniform class. Optimal\u0000mixed strategies of Player 2 have much more complex structure.\u0000</p>","PeriodicalId":607,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied and Industrial Mathematics","volume":"18 1","pages":"70 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.58,"publicationDate":"2024-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140804614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}