An Extremal-y Fun Problem of Coordination: extremal/saturation numbers for guessing numbers

Jo Martin (UVM) 

March 2nd, 4:00 PM, Innovation E432

Abstract: Hat Guessing Games, logic puzzles where a group of players must try to guess the color of their own hat, have been a fun party game for years but in the past 20 years have become of academic interest.  In 2006, Søren Riis, a computer scientist, introduced a new variant of the hat guessing game that has applications to information networks and circuit complexity.  In this talk we go over the guessing number, an invariant associated with Riis's guessing game, some applications, the concept of graph entropy and new results on the extremal and saturation numbers of the guessing number.