English

Some i-Mark games

Combinatorics 2021-07-01 v3 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Let SS be a set of positive integers, and let DD be a set of integers larger than 11. The game ii-Mark(S,D)(S,D) is an impartial combinatorial game introduced by Sopena (2016), which is played with a single pile of tokens. In each turn, a player can subtract sSs \in S from the pile, or divide the size of the pile by dDd \in D, if the pile size is divisible by dd. Sopena partially analyzed the games with S=[1,t1]S=[1, t-1] and D={d}D=\{d\} for d≢1(modt)d \not\equiv 1 \pmod t, but left the case d1(modt)d \equiv 1 \pmod t open. We solve this problem by calculating the Sprague-Grundy function of ii-Mark([1,t1],{d})([1,t-1],\{d\}) for d1(modt)d \equiv 1 \pmod t, for all t,d2t,d \geq 2. We also calculate the Sprague-Grundy function of ii-Mark({2},{2k+1})(\{2\},\{2k + 1\}) for all kk, and show that it exhibits similar behavior. Finally, following Sopena's suggestion to look at games with D>1|D|>1, we derive some partial results for the game ii-Mark({1},{2,3})(\{1\}, \{2, 3\}), whose Sprague-Grundy function seems to behave erratically and does not show any clean pattern. We prove that each value 0,1,20,1,2 occurs infinitely often in its SG sequence, with a maximum gap length between consecutive appearances.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.00721,
  title  = {Some i-Mark games},
  author = {Oren Friman and Gabriel Nivasch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.00721},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Minor revisions. 12 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:46:54.445Z