Related papers: Notes on solving and playing peg solitaire on a co…
In this paper, we present a board game: Square War. The game definition of Square War is similar to the classic Chinese board game Go. Then we propose a mathematical problem of the game Square War. Finally, we show that the problem can be…
This paper proposes a new method for finding closed-loop saddle points in zero-sum linear-quadratic stochastic differential games by decoupling their inherent structure. Specifically, we develop a nested iterative scheme that constructs a…
In repeated games, players choose actions concurrently at each step. We consider a parameterized setting of repeated games in which the players form a population of an arbitrary size. Their utility functions encode a reachability objective.…
Mechanical shufflers used in many casinos employ a card shuffling scheme called \emph{shelf shuffling}. In a single-shelf shuffling, cards arrive sequentially, and each incoming card is independently placed on the top or the bottom of a…
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 prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…
A generalized `$15$ puzzle' consists of an $n \times n$ numbered grid, with one missing number. A move in the game switches the position of the empty square with the position of one of its neighbors. We solve Diaconis' `15 puzzle problem'…
Many real-world strategic games involve interactions between multiple players. We study a hierarchical multi-player game structure, where players with asymmetric roles can be separated into leaders and followers, a setting often referred to…
The strength of chess engines together with the availability of numerous chess games have attracted the attention of chess players, data scientists, and researchers during the last decades. State-of-the-art engines now provide an…
In the peg insertion task, human pays attention to the seam between the peg and the hole and tries to fill it continuously with visual feedback. By imitating the human behavior, we design architectures with position and orientation…
The domination game is played on a graph $G$ by two players, named Dominator and Staller. They alternatively select vertices of $G$ such that each chosen vertex enlarges the set of vertices dominated before the move on it. Dominator's goal…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
We propose a class of two person perfect information games based on weighted graphs. One of these games can be described in terms of a round pizza which is cut radially into pieces of varying size. The two players alternately take pieces…
In this article we demonstrate how to solve a variety of problems and puzzles using the built-in SAT solver of the computer algebra system Maple. Once the problems have been encoded into Boolean logic, solutions can be found (or shown to…
Cooperative games with nonempty core are called balanced, and the set of balanced games is a polyhedron. Given a game with empty core, we look for the closest balanced game, in the sense of the (weighted) Euclidean distance, i.e., the…
In this paper we revisit some classic board games like Pachisi or the Game of Gosse. The main contribution of the paper is to design and add some functionalities to the games in order to transform them in serious games, that is, in games…
Number the cells of a (possibly infinite) chessboard in some way with the numbers 0, 1, 2, ... Consider the cells in order, placing a queen in a cell if and only if it would not attack any earlier queen. The problem is to determine the…
In this paper, we study the average case complexity of the Unique Games problem. We propose a natural semi-random model, in which a unique game instance is generated in several steps. First an adversary selects a completely satisfiable…
The point placement problem is to determine the positions of a set of $n$ distinct points, P = {p1, p2, p3, ..., pn}, on a line uniquely, up to translation and reflection, from the fewest possible distance queries between pairs of points.…
Given a series of photographs taken during a Go game, we describe the techniques we successfully employ for pinpointing the grid lines of the Go board and for tracking their small movements between consecutive photographs; then we discuss…