Extended circular nim
Abstract
Circular nim is a variant of nim, in which there are piles of tokens arranged in a circle and each player, in their turn, chooses at most consecutive piles in the circle and removes an arbitrary number of tokens from each pile. The player must remove at least one token in total. For some cases of and , closed formulas to determine which player has a winning strategy have been found. Almost all cases are still open problems. In this paper, we consider a variant of circular nim, extended circular nim. In extended circular nim , there are piles of tokes arranged in a circle. is a set of positive integers less than or equal to half of . In each turn, a player chooses an integer . Then the player selects at most piles among those located every -th position on the circle, and removes an arbitrary number of tokens from each selected pile. We show some closed formulas to determine which player has a winning strategy for the cases where the number of piles is no more than eight, and for a few generalized cases.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.12045,
title = {Extended circular nim},
author = {Koki Suetsugu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12045},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
18 pages, 7 figures