Fast winning strategies in a generalized van der Waerden game
Combinatorics
2026-01-28 v2
Abstract
Consider the following Maker-Breaker game. Fix a finite subset of the naturals. The players Maker and Breaker take turns choosing previously unclaimed natural numbers. Maker wins by eventually building a homothetic copy of , where and . This is a generalization of the van der Waerden game analyzed by Beck. By the Hales-Jewett theorem, there exists a constant depending only on such that Maker can win in or less moves. We show that Maker can win in moves if . When , we show that Maker can always win in or less moves and describe all such that Maker can win in moves. If , Maker has no winning strategy in moves.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2309.11367,
title = {Fast winning strategies in a generalized van der Waerden game},
author = {Hannah Alpert and Liam Barham and Brian Freidin and Ian Tan and Alexandra Weiner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.11367},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
17 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables