English

Two player game variant of the Erdos-Szekeres problem

Computational Geometry 2012-07-31 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The classical Erdos-Szekeres theorem states that a convex kk-gon exists in every sufficiently large point set. This problem has been well studied and finding tight asymptotic bounds is considered a challenging open problem. Several variants of the Erdos-Szekeres problem have been posed and studied in the last two decades. The well studied variants include the empty convex kk-gon problem, convex kk-gon with specified number of interior points and the chromatic variant. In this paper, we introduce the following two player game variant of the Erdos-Szekeres problem: Consider a two player game where each player playing in alternate turns, place points in the plane. The objective of the game is to avoid the formation of the convex k-gon among the placed points. The game ends when a convex k-gon is formed and the player who placed the last point loses the game. In our paper we show a winning strategy for the player who plays second in the convex 5-gon game and the empty convex 5-gon game by considering convex layer configurations at each step. We prove that the game always ends in the 9th step by showing that the game reaches a specific set of configurations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.6778,
  title  = {Two player game variant of the Erdos-Szekeres problem},
  author = {Parikshit Kolipaka and Sathish Govindarajan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.6778},
  year   = {2012}
}