English

Atropos-k is PSPACE-complete

Computational Complexity 2025-03-25 v1 Discrete Mathematics Combinatorics

Abstract

Burke and Teng introduced a two-player combinatorial game Atropos based on Sperner's lemma, and showed that deciding whether one has a winning strategy for Atropos is PSPACE-complete. In the original Atropos game, the players must color a node adjacent to the last colored node. Burke and Teng also mentioned a variant Atropos-k in which each move is at most of distance k of the previous move, and asked a question on determining the computational complexity of this variant. In this paper, we answer this question by showing that for any fixed integer k (k>=2), Atropos-k is PSPACE-complete by reduction from True Quantified Boolean Formula (TQBF).

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.01662,
  title  = {Atropos-k is PSPACE-complete},
  author = {Chao Yang and Zhujun Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.01662},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:07:47.199Z