Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2105.11650

Using Game Theory to maximize the chance of victory in two-player sports

Ambareesh Ravi·Atharva Gokhale·Anchit Nagwekar
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Game Theory concepts have been successfully applied in a wide variety of domains over the past decade. Sports and games are one of the popular areas of game theory application owing to its merits and benefits in solving complex scenarios. With recent advancements in technology, the technical and analytical assistance available to players before the match, during game-play and after the match in the form of post-match analysis for any kind of sport has improved to a great extent. In this paper, we propose three novel approaches towards the development of a tool that can assist the players by providing detailed analysis of optimal decisions so that the player is well prepared with the most appropriate strategy which would produce a favourable result for a given opponent's strategy. We also describe how the system changes when we consider real-time game-play wherein the history of the opponent's strategies in the current rally is also taken into consideration while suggesting.

Explore related subjects

cs.GT

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Ambareesh Ravi, Atharva Gokhale, Anchit Nagwekar. 2021-05-25. Using Game Theory to maximize the chance of victory in two-player sports. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11650

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

MMS Allocation for Chores with Online Agent Arrivals

We study the fair allocation of $m$ indivisible chores to $n$ agents with subadditive cost functions arriving online in an arbitrary order. Upon an agent's arrival, we are informed of her cost function and must irrevocably assign her a set of chores. We focus on the Maximin Share (MMS) fairness notion and aim to compute an allocation in which all items are assigned, and no agent incurs a cost more than $\alpha$ times her MMS. Without any prior information about the instance (other than $n$ and $m$), we design an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{n, k\log^{1+\epsilon}k, \log m\})$ for any constant $\epsilon > 0$, where $k$ denotes the number of cost function types. Our bound matches the best known offline approximation guarantees for MMS under subadditive costs and is nearly optimal with respect to all three parameters: we show that even for binary additive cost functions, no online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio of $o(\min\{n, k\log k, \log m\})$. We then consider the setting in which the $k$ cost function types are known in advance (though the realized types of arriving agents are not). For additive cost functions, we provide an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{\log k, \log(kn)/\log\log(kn)\})$, and show that constant-competitive algorithms do not exist for general $k$, even for the binary additive setting. For binary additive functions when $k \le n$, we propose a $3$-competitive algorithm and establish a lower bound of $2$.

cs.GT↗
arXiv2026

Truncated Noisy Best-Response Algorithms: Toward Game Theoretic Learning with Safety Guarantees

We consider a game theoretic approach to solve multi-agent coordination problems with submodular maximization objectives. It is known for such problems that the Nash equilibria for the corresponding game are always within 50% of the optimal, but that the equilibria which achieve this worst-case bound are not stable. To exploit this instability, we propose a family of algorithms which we call Truncated Noisy Best-Response (TNBR) Algorithms. These algorithms are flexibly characterized by agents asynchronously and stochastically selecting actions from a neighbourhood of their best response payoffs. We compute bounds on the recurrent classes of TNBR algorithms' associated Markov chains. Our bounds fall into two categories: first, "Performance" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms always have a high-value recurrent state; second, "Safety" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms never have arbitrarily-bad recurrent states. Furthermore, these two types of bounds are linked by a waterbed-like effect: every game with a poor Safety guarantee necessarily has a favorable Performance guarantee.

cs.GT↗
arXiv2026

Existence of the Core in Approval-Based Committee Elections

We settle the main open question in the theory of approval-based multi-winner elections: we show that there always exists a committee in the core. The core is a stability and group fairness concept. The proof introduces a new voting rule that optimizes an entropy-like objective function over committees and payment systems. All local optima of this objective function lie in the core, which implies that a core committee can be found in polynomial time.

cs.GT↗