English

On sums of $\mathscr{P}$-free forms under mis\`ere play

Combinatorics 2025-06-06 v1

Abstract

Milley and Renault proved an interesting characterisation of invertible elements in the dead-ending universe: they are the games with no subpositions of outcome P\mathscr{P} (the 'P\mathscr{P}-free' games). We generalise their approach to obtain a stronger result and show in particular that the set of P\mathscr{P}-free blocking games is closed under addition, which yields that every P\mathscr{P}-free blocking game is invertible modulo the blocking universe. This has consequences for the invertible subgroups of various other mis\`ere monoids.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.05257,
  title  = {On sums of $\mathscr{P}$-free forms under mis\`ere play},
  author = {Alfie Davies and Sarah Miller and Rebecca Milley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05257},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

35 pages, 2 figures