How to play the one-lie Rényi-Ulam game

The one-lie Rényi-Ulam liar game is a two-player perfect information zero-sum game, lasting q rounds, on the set [n]?{1,…,n}. In each round Paul chooses a subset A⊆[n] and Carole either assigns one lie to each element of A or to each element of [n]?A. Paul wins the original (resp. pathological) game if after q rounds there is at most one (resp. at least one) element with one or fewer lies. We exhibit a simple, unified, optimal strategy for Paul to follow in both games, and use this to determine which player can win for all q,n and for both games.     

The Rényi–Ulam pathological liar game with a fixed number of lies

The q-round Rényi–Ulam pathological liar game with k lies on the set [n]{1,…,n} is a 2-player perfect information zero sum game. In each round Paul chooses a subset A[n] and Carole either assigns 1 lie to each element of A or to each element of [n]A. Paul wins if after q rounds there is at least one element with k or fewer lies. The game is dual to the original Rényi–Ulam liar game for which the winning condition is that at most one element has k or fewer lies. Define to be the minimum n such that Paul can win the q-round pathological liar game with k lies and initial set [n]. For fixed k we prove that is within an absolute constant (depending only on k) of the sphere bound, ; this is already known to hold for the original Rényi–Ulam liar game due to a result of J. Spencer.     

How to play the Majority game with a liar

The Majority game is played by a questioner () and an answerer (). holds n elements, each of which can be labeled as 0 or 1. is trying to identify some element holds as having the Majority label or, in the case of a tie, claim there is none. To do this asks questions comparing whether two elements have the same or different label. ’s goal is to ask as few questions as possible while ’s goal is to delay as much as possible. Let q^∗ denote the minimal number of questions needed for to identify a Majority element regardless of ’s answers.In this paper we investigate upper and lower bounds for q^∗ in a variation of the Majority game, where is allowed to lie up to t times. We consider two versions of the game, the adaptive (where questions are asked sequentially) and the oblivious (where questions are asked in one batch).