English

Constructing All Birthday 3 Games as Digraphs

Combinatorics 2025-05-12 v1

Abstract

Recently, Clow and McKay proved that the Digraph Placement ruleset is universal for normal play: for all normal play combinatorial games XX, there is a Digraph Placement game GG with G=XG=X. Clow and McKay also showed that the 22 game values born by day 2 correspond to Digraph Placement games with at most 4 vertices. This bound is best possible. We extend this work using a combination of exhaustive and random searches to demonstrate all 1474 values born by day 3 correspond to Digraph Placement games on at most 8 vertices. We provide a combinatorial proof that this bound is best possible. We conclude by giving improved bounds on the number of vertices required to construct all game values born by days 4 and 5.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.06206,
  title  = {Constructing All Birthday 3 Games as Digraphs},
  author = {Alexander Clow and Alfie Davies and Neil Anderson McKay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.06206},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

19 pages, 2 figures, code in ancillary files

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:27:30.441Z