English

A vertex and edge deletion game on graphs

Combinatorics 2018-10-23 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Starting with a graph, two players take turns in either deleting an edge or deleting a vertex and all incident edges. The player removing the last vertex wins. We review the known results for this game and extend the computation of nim-values to new families of graphs. A conjecture of Khandhawit and Ye on the nim-values of graphs with one odd cycle is proved. We also see that, for wheels and their subgraphs, this game exhibits a surprising amount of unexplained regularity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.01354,
  title  = {A vertex and edge deletion game on graphs},
  author = {Cormac O'Sullivan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.01354},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

25 pages, 29 figures, minor corrections and improvements, appearing in Integers

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:33:28.008Z