English

The diameter game

Combinatorics 2016-05-24 v2

Abstract

A large class of Positional Games are defined on the complete graph on nn vertices. The players, Maker and Breaker, take the edges of the graph in turns, and Maker wins iff his subgraph has a given -- usually monotone -- property. Here we introduce the dd-diameter game, which means that Maker wins iff the diameter of his subgraph is at most dd. We investigate the biased version of the game; i.e., when the players may take more than one, and not necessarily the same number of edges, in a turn. Our main result is that we proved that the 22-diameter game has the following surprising property: Breaker wins the game in which each player chooses one edge per turn, but Maker wins as long as he is permitted to choose 22 edges in each turn whereas Breaker can choose as many as (1/9)n1/8/(lnn)3/8(1/9)n^{1/8}/(\ln n)^{3/8}. In addition, we investigate dd-diameter games for d3d\ge 3. The diameter games are strongly related to the degree games. Thus, we also provide a generalization of the fair degree game for the biased case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.05698,
  title  = {The diameter game},
  author = {József Balogh and Ryan R. Martin and András Pluhár},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.05698},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

24 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:04:01.515Z