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A Numbers-on-Foreheads Game

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Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2015 (MFCS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9235))

Abstract

Is there a joint distribution of n random variables over the natural numbers, such that they always form an increasing sequence and whenever you take two subsets of the set of random variables of the same cardinality, their distribution is almost the same?

We show that the answer is yes, but that the random variables will have to take values as large as , where \(\epsilon \le \epsilon _n\) measures how different the two distributions can be, the tower contains \(n-2\) 2’s and the constants in the \(\varTheta \) notation are allowed to depend on n. This result has an important consequence in game theory: It shows that even though you can define extensive form games that cannot be implemented on players who can tell the time, you can have implementations that approximate the game arbitrarily well.

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Correspondence to Sune K. Jakobsen .

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Jakobsen, S.K. (2015). A Numbers-on-Foreheads Game. In: Italiano, G., Pighizzini, G., Sannella, D. (eds) Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2015. MFCS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9235. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48054-0_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48054-0_35

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-48053-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-48054-0

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