Related papers: Phutball is PSPACE-hard

The physics-based simulation game Angry Birds has been heavily researched by the AI community over the past five years, and has been the subject of a popular AI competition that is currently held annually as part of a leading AI conference.…

We study algorithmic complexity of solving subtraction games in a~fixed dimension with a finite difference set. We prove that there exists a game in this class such that any algorithm solving the game runs in exponential time. Also we prove…

The game of Paintbucket was recently introduced by Amundsen and Erickson. It is played on a rectangular grid of black and white pixels. The players alternately fill in one of their opponent's connected components with their own color, until…

This paper describes Wythoff's game with a pass, which is a variant of the classical Wythoff's game. The classical form is played with two piles of stones, from which two players take turns to remove stones from one or both piles. When…

Snake is a classic computer game, which has been around for decades. Based on this game, we study the game of Snake on arbitrary undirected graphs. A snake forms a simple path that has to move to an apple while avoiding colliding with…

Let $(X, \mathcal{F})$ be a hypergraph. The Maker-Breaker game on $(X, \mathcal{F})$ is a combinatorial game between two players, Maker and Breaker. Beginning with Maker, the players take turns claiming vertices from $X$ that have not yet…

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…

In many combinatorial games, one can prove that the first player wins under best play using a simple but non-constructive argument called strategy-stealing. This work is about the complexity behind these proofs: how hard is it to actually…

We propose a generalization of positional games, supplementing them with a restriction on the order in which the elements of the board are allowed to be claimed. We introduce poset positional games, which are positional games with an…

Without further ado, we present the P_3-game. The P_3-game is decidable for elementary classes of graphs such as paths and cycles. From an algorithmic point of view, the connected P_3-game is fascinating. We show that the connected P_3-game…

During the last twenty years, a lot of research was conducted on the sport elimination problem: Given a sports league and its remaining matches, we have to decide whether a given team can still possibly win the competition, i.e., place…

For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…

We analyse the computational complexity of finding Nash equilibria in simple stochastic multiplayer games. We show that restricting the search space to equilibria whose payoffs fall into a certain interval may lead to undecidability. In…

It is NP-hard to decide if a given pure-strategy Nash equilibrium of a given three-player game in strategic form with integer payoffs is trembling hand perfect.

Exactly 20 years ago at MFCS, Demaine posed the open problem whether the game of Dots & Boxes is PSPACE-complete. Dots & Boxes has been studied extensively, with for instance a chapter in Berlekamp et al. "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical…

We introduce the following class of partizan games, called pomax games. Given a partially ordered set whose elements are colored black or white, the players Black and White take turns removing any maximal element of their own color. If…

Pebble games are single-player games on DAGs involving placing and moving pebbles on nodes of the graph according to a certain set of rules. The goal is to pebble a set of target nodes using a minimum number of pebbles. In this paper, we…

Given a graph $G$, a set $S$ of vertices in $G$ is a general position set if no triple of vertices from $S$ lie on a common shortest path in $G$. The general position achievement/avoidance game is played on a graph $G$ by players A and B…

We prove that computing an $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium of a win-lose bimatrix game with constant sparsity is PPAD-hard for inverse-polynomial $\epsilon$. Our result holds for 3-sparse games, which is tight given that 2-sparse…

In many applications, we want to influence the decisions of independent agents by designing incentives for their actions. We revisit a fundamental problem in this area, called GAME IMPLEMENTATION: Given a game in standard form and a set of…