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A zero-sum two person Perfect Information Stochastic game (PISG) under limiting average payoff has a value and both the maximiser and the minimiser have optimal pure stationary strategies. Firstly we form the matrix of undiscounted payoffs…
In this paper, we study the algorithmic complexity of the Mastermind game, where results are single-color black pegs. This differs from the usual dual-color version of the game, but better corresponds to applications in genetics. We show…
Since the advent of computers, many tasks which required humans to spend a lot of time and energy have been trivialized by the computers' ability to perform repetitive tasks extremely quickly. Playing chess is one such task. It was one of…
While the game Connect-Four has been solved mathematically and the best move can be effectively computed with search based methods, a strong solution in the form of a look-up table was believed to be infeasible. In this paper, we revisit a…
A set of n boxes, located on the vertices of a hypergraph G, contain known but different rewards. A Searcher opens all the boxes in some hyperedge of G with the objective of collecting the maximum possible total reward. Some of the boxes,…
Motivated by the results for Magic: The Gathering presented in [CBH20] and [Bid20], we study a (different) computability problem about winning strategies in Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, a popular card game developed and published by Konami.…
This paper considers a game version of the general position problem in which a general position set is built through adversarial play. Two players in a graph, Builder and Blocker, take it in turns to add a vertex to a set, such that the…
Graph Pebbling is a well-studied single-player game on graphs. We introduce the game of Blocking Pebbles which adapts Graph Pebbling into a two-player strategy game in order to examine it within the context of Combinatorial Game Theory.…
We propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
We explain a highly efficient algorithm for playing the simplest type of dots and boxes endgame optimally (by which we mean "in such a way so as to maximise the number of boxes that you take"). The algorithm is sufficiently simple that it…
This paper studies the game of guessing riffle-shuffled cards with complete feedback. A deck of $n$ cards labelled 1 to $n$ is riffle-shuffled once and placed on a table. A player tries to guess the cards from top and is given complete…
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
First cycle games (FCG) are played on a finite graph by two players who push a token along the edges until a vertex is repeated, and a simple cycle is formed. The winner is determined by some fixed property Y of the sequence of labels of…
Partially-ordered set games, also called poset games, are a class of two-player combinatorial games. The playing field consists of a set of elements, some of which are greater than other elements. Two players take turns removing an element…
Predicting and modeling human behavior and finding trends within human decision-making processes is a major problem of social science. Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) is the fundamental strategic question in many game theory problems and…
We consider the computational complexity of Hearthstone which is a popular online CCG (collectible card game). We reduce a PSPACE-complete problem, the partition game, to perfect information Hearthstone in which there is no hidden…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
We study two positional games played on hypergraphs, whose edges may be interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex of the hypergraph. We say a player fills an edge if that player has picked all…
The $\mathscr{P}$-position sets of some combinatorial games have special combinatorial structures. For example, the $\mathscr{P}$-position set of the hexad game, first investigated by Conway and Ryba, is the block set of the Steiner system…