English

The Link Smoothing Game

Combinatorics 2012-08-15 v2 Geometric Topology

Abstract

We introduce a topological combinatorial game called the Link Smoothing Game. The game is played on the shadow of a link diagram and legal moves consist of smoothing precrossings. One player's goal is to keep the diagram connected while the other player's goal is to disconnect the shadow. We make significant progress towards a complete classification of link shadows into outcome classes by capitalizing on the relationship between link shadows and the planar graphs associated to their checkerboard colorings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.4103,
  title  = {The Link Smoothing Game},
  author = {Allison Henrich and Inga Johnson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.4103},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

Final journal version to appear in AKCE Journal of Graphs and Combinatorics, 15 pages, 13 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:07:17.700Z