New #openaccess article in The Mathematical Gazette:
Optimal play in ‘Guess Who?’

Suggests using questions with an embedded paradox to produce three responses from your opponent - yes, no, or argh paradox head explodes - allowing you to narrow down the suspects more quickly.

The authors say their optimal strategy uses nothing "more advanced than induction and a recursion relation based on elementary probability... Hence Guess Who? could guide an introduction to #GameTheory to interested students through a ‘real-world’ game."

#MathsToday #ALevelMaths #MTBoS #ITeachMath

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00255572.2026.2652912

I wrote this strange little program to try and figure out just how many magic items would a character have at various levels in Moldvay/Cook B/X Dungeons & Dragons.

The concept is,
You are a level 1 fighter.
You pick what level you want to be.
It generates rooms from the stock tables.
It generates monsters from the monster tables.
It generates treasure from the treasure tables.

You defeat all monsters.
You find all treasure.

The simulation stops when you reach (or go above) the desired level.

https://random-wizard.neocities.org/tunnel-of-adventure/

#dnd #ttrpg #osr #gametheory

Ultimatum game
Golden ratio, mathematics and... something you can't compute: emotions.

Research paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05122-5

@cultura

#mathematics #GameTheory #psychology

**New preprint**: "An Exact Cooperation Formula for Introspection Dynamics in the Heterogeneous Public Goods Game"

In this preprint we obtain a nice formula for the steady state probabilities in Introspection Dynamics for a specific subset of games.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23513

#gametheory

Kinda ironic that game theory #research has to go through a negative-sum medium in order to be relevant, ain’t it?

#academia #gametheory #science #academicpublishing