We study games in which a referee poses a guessing challenge, and two or more players aim to coordinate their guesses to meet a joint winning condition. The players can devise a joint strategy in preparation for the game, but they cannot communicate once the game starts. Classic games include various hat-color-guessing puzzles where players use codes to correlate their guesses. Such games provide simple, illustrative examples to help appreciate various notions in coding theory, telecommunications, combinatorics, and communication complexity. Quantum guessing games are an effective modern tool for studying the kinds of correlations that are possible when players share entangled quantum states. They are of interest to both the foundations of quantum mechanics and envisioned quantum computing applications, e.g., cryptography. This talk discusses codes and entanglement as coordination tools and correlation-building devices in several multi-player games.
Emina Soljanin is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers. Before moving to Rutgers in January 2016, she was a (Distinguished) Member of Technical Staff for 21 years in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center of Bell Labs. Her interests and expertise are broad, currently spanning distributed computing and quantum information science. She is an IEEE Fellow, an outstanding alumnus of the Texas A&M School of Engineering, the 2011 Padovani Lecturer, a 2016/17 Distinguished Lecturer, and the 2019 IEEE Information Theory Society President. In 2023, Emina received the IEEE Information Theory Society Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award and the Mrs. Urmila Agrawal Distinguished Visiting Chair Professorship at the Indian Institute of Science.