English

Three-player impartial games

Combinatorics 2007-05-23 v2

Abstract

Past efforts to classify impartial three-player combinatorial games (the theories of Li and Straffin) have made various restrictive assumptions about the rationality of one's opponents and the formation and behavior of coalitions. One may instead adopt an agnostic attitude towards such issues, and seek only to understand in what circumstances one player has a winning strategy against the combined forces of the other two. By limiting ourselves to this more modest theoretical objective, and by regarding two games as being equivalent if they are interchangeable in all disjunctive sums,as far as single-player winnability is concerned, we can obtain an interesting analogue of Grundy values for three-player impartial games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/9903153,
  title  = {Three-player impartial games},
  author = {James Propp},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/9903153},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

8 pages, 10 tables; to appear in Theoretical Computer Science