English

On strong avoiding games

Computer Science and Game Theory 2025-05-30 v3

Abstract

Given an increasing graph property F\cal F, the strong Avoider-Avoider F\cal F game is played on the edge set of a complete graph. Two players, Red and Blue, take turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges with Red going first, and the player whose graph possesses F\cal F first loses the game. If the property F\cal F is "containing a fixed graph HH", we refer to the game as the HH game. We prove that Blue has a winning strategy in two strong Avoider-Avoider games, P4P_4 game and CC>3{\cal CC}_{>3} game, where CC>3{\cal CC}_{>3} is the property of having at least one connected component on more than three vertices. We also study a variant, the strong CAvoider-CAvoider games, with additional requirement that the graph of each of the players must stay connected throughout the game. We prove that Blue has a winning strategy in the strong CAvoider-CAvoider games S3S_3 and P4P_4, as well as in the CycleCycle game, where the players aim at avoiding all cycles.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.07971,
  title  = {On strong avoiding games},
  author = {Miloš Stojaković and Jelena Stratijev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.07971},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

23 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:50:16.178Z