Related papers: Further Hopping with Toads and Frogs

We develop a finite-state automata approach, implemented in a Maple package {\tt ToadsAndFrogs} available from our websites, for conjecturing, and then rigorously proving, values for large families of positions in Richard Guy's…

Positional games are a branch of combinatorics, researching a variety of two-player games, ranging from popular recreational games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Hex, to purely abstract games played on graphs and hypergraphs. It is closely…

We develop a theory of combinatorial games that is appropriate for describing positions in Hex and other monotone set coloring games. We consider two natural conditions on such games: a game is monotone if all moves available to both…

We introduce a new combinatorial game, named Triangle Game. In this game, a directed $3$-cycle graph is given, and tokens are placed on each vertex. The player chooses an edge and takes at least one token from the initial vertex. At the…

In an investigation of the applications of Combinatorial Game Theory to chess, we construct novel mutual Zugzwang positions, explain an otherwise mysterious pawn endgame from "A Guide to Chess Endings" (Euwe and Hooper), show positions…

Dots-and-Boxes is a child's game which remains analytically unsolved. We implement and evolve artificial neural networks to play this game, evaluating them against simple heuristic players. Our networks do not evaluate or predict the final…

We introduce a two-player game involving two tokens located at points of a fixed set. The players take turns to move a token to an unoccupied point in such a way that the distance between the two tokens is decreased. Optimal strategies for…

In this paper, we propose a Quantum variation of combinatorial games, generalizing the Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe proposed by Allan Goff. A combinatorial game is a two-player game with no chance and no hidden information, such as Go or Chess. In…

We begin by reviewing and proving the basic facts of combinatorial game theory. We then consider scoring games (also known as Milnor games or positional games), focusing on the "fixed-length" games for which all sequences of play terminate…

In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…

Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) such that a game instance admits a winning…

Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…

We review a combinatoric approach to the Hodge Conjecture for Fermat Varieties and announce new cases where the conjecture is true.

We show how the software Walnut can be used to obtain concise proofs of results concerning variants of the famous Wythoff game, in which blocking maneuvers or terminal positions are added, as discussed respectively by Larsson (2011) and…

In a recent article in American Scientist, Theodore Hill described a coin-tossing game whose pay-off is the number of heads over the total number of throws. Suppose that at a given point during the game you have 5 heads and 3 tails, should…

Combinatorial Scoring games, with the property `extra pass moves for a player does no harm', are characterized. The characterization involves an order embedding of Conway's Normal-play games. Also, we give a theorem for comparing games with…

This thesis will be discussing scoring play combinatorial games and looking at the general structure of these games under different operators. I will also be looking at the Sprague-Grundy values for scoring play impartial games, and…

Parrondo's paradox is about a paradoxical game and gambling where two probabilistic losing games can be combined to form a winning game. While the counter intuitive game is interesting in itself, it can be thought of a discrete version of…

Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…

We introduce a new impartial game, named Multiple Hook Removing Game (MHRG for short). We also determine the $\mathcal{G}$-values of some game positions (including the starting positions) in MHRG$(m,n)$, the MHRG whose starting position is…