Student Seminar
Speaker: Omkar Ramdas, IIT Bombay
Host: Suman Kumar Sahoo
Title: Putting on Your Thinking Cap: How to Get A Head in a Guessing Game
Time, day and date: 3:30:00 PM – 4:30:00 PM, Friday, September 11
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Abstract: You might have heard about the Colored hats guessing game where 'n' players, each wearing a randomly assigned black or white hat, must attempt to guess their own hat color without communicating. A simple strategy easily yields a 50% success rate, so the real question is "Can we improve this success rate significantly?". We will demonstrate how to improve these odds for a large, fixed 'n' by translating the game into a structural problem on the Boolean hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$. We will then use some basic probabilistic methods to get better strategy which will "almost" surely make you win. If time permits, we will see its connections with Hamming codes.