English

Extended circular nim

Combinatorics 2026-02-03 v2

Abstract

Circular nim CN(m,k)CN(m, k) is a variant of nim, in which there are mm piles of tokens arranged in a circle and each player, in their turn, chooses at most kk 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 mm and kk, 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 ECN(mS,k)ECN(m_S, k), there are mm piles of tokes arranged in a circle. SS is a set of positive integers less than or equal to half of mm. In each turn, a player chooses an integer sSs \in S. Then the player selects at most kk piles among those located every ss-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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:12:18.300Z