English

Impartial Chess on Integer Partitions

Combinatorics 2025-01-27 v1

Abstract

Berlekamp proposed a class of impartial combinatorial games based on the moves of chess pieces on rectangular boards. We generalize impartial chess games by playing them on Young diagrams and obtain results about winning and losing positions and Sprague-Grundy values for all chess pieces. We classify these games, and their restrictions to sets of partitions known as rectangles, staircases, and general staircases, according to the approach of Conway, later extended by Gurvich and Ho. The games ROOK\rm {R\small OOK} and QUEEN\rm{Q\small UEEN} restricted to rectangles are known to have the same game tree as 22-pile NIM\rm N{\small IM} and WYTHOFF\rm W{\small YTHOFF}, respectively, so our work generalizes these well-known games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.14640,
  title  = {Impartial Chess on Integer Partitions},
  author = {Eric Gottlieb and Matjaž Krnc and Peter Muršič},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.14640},
  year   = {2025}
}