A Fourier approach to Levine's hat puzzle

Steven Heilman; Omer Tamuz

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arXiv · 2503.09042

A Fourier approach to Levine's hat puzzle

Steven Heilman·Omer Tamuz

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Abstract

We consider Lionel Levine's notorious hat puzzle with two players. Each player has a stack of hats on their head, and each hat is chosen independently to be either black or white. After observing only the other player's hats, players simultaneously choose one of their own hats. The players win if both chosen hats are black. In this note, we observe an upper bound on the probability of success, using Chang's lemma, a result in Boolean harmonic analysis.

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Steven Heilman, Omer Tamuz. 2025-03-12. A Fourier approach to Levine's hat puzzle. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09042

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