English

Strategy-Stealing is Non-Constructive

Data Structures and Algorithms 2019-11-19 v1 Computer Science and Game Theory Combinatorics

Abstract

In many combinatorial games, one can prove that the first player wins under best play using a simple but non-constructive argument called strategy-stealing. This work is about the complexity behind these proofs: how hard is it to actually find a winning move in a game, when you know by strategy-stealing that one exists? We prove that this problem is PSPACE-hard already for Minimum Poset Games and Symmetric Maker-Maker Games, which are simple classes of games that capture two of the main types of strategy-stealing arguments in the current literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.06907,
  title  = {Strategy-Stealing is Non-Constructive},
  author = {Greg Bodwin and Ofer Grossman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.06907},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

ITCS 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:17:41.962Z