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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bhatia, Manan, Chin, Byron, Mani, Nitya, Mossel, Elchanan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03535
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author Bhatia, Manan
Chin, Byron
Mani, Nitya
Mossel, Elchanan
author_facet Bhatia, Manan
Chin, Byron
Mani, Nitya
Mossel, Elchanan
contents We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of cards is $n$, and show that all have expected termination time of order $n^2$. This is the same expected termination time as in the game where at each turn a fair coin toss decides which player wins a card, known as Gambler's Ruin and studied by Pascal, Fermat and others in the seventeenth century.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_03535
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When will (game) wars end?
Bhatia, Manan
Chin, Byron
Mani, Nitya
Mossel, Elchanan
Combinatorics
60C05
We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of cards is $n$, and show that all have expected termination time of order $n^2$. This is the same expected termination time as in the game where at each turn a fair coin toss decides which player wins a card, known as Gambler's Ruin and studied by Pascal, Fermat and others in the seventeenth century.
title When will (game) wars end?
topic Combinatorics
60C05
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03535