Related papers: The complexity of UNO

The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…

We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…

Capacitated network bargaining games are popular combinatorial games that involve the structure of matchings in graphs. We show that it is always possible to stabilize unit-weight instances of this problem (that is, ensure that they admit a…

"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…

The class of algorithmically computable simple games (i) includes the class of games that have finite carriers and (ii) is included in the class of games that have finite winning coalitions. This paper characterizes computable games,…

We will describe a combinatorial game that models the problem of resolution of singularities of algebraic varieties over a field of characteristic zero. By giving a winning strategy for this game, we give another proof of the existence of…

We solve the problem of one-dimensional Peg Solitaire. In particular, we show that the set of configurations that can be reduced to a single peg forms a regular language, and that a linear-time algorithm exists for reducing any…

This paper studies the complexity of computing a representation of a simple game as the intersection (union) of weighted majority games, as well as, the dimension or the codimension. We also present some examples with linear dimension and…

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…

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…

We study computational problems arising from the iterated removal of weakly dominated actions in anonymous games. Our main result shows that it is NP-complete to decide whether an anonymous game with three actions can be solved via iterated…

We analyze the computational complexity of the problem of deciding whether, for a given simple game, there exists the possibility of rearranging the participants in a set of $j$ given losing coalitions into a set of $j$ winning coalitions.…

We present three versions of the classic two-pile game \textsc{one-or-one-or-one-of-both} generalized to the multi-pile context. In each case, we explore the resulting $\mathcal{P}$-positions. In the first version, there is a simple…

We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…

We examine short combinatorial games for three or more players under a new play convention in which a player who cannot move on their turn is the unique loser. We show that many theorems of impartial and partizan two-player games under…

We investigate the difficulty of finding economically efficient solutions to coordination problems on graphs. Our work focuses on two forms of coordination problem: pure-coordination games and anti-coordination games. We consider three…

Let A, B, C, D be given finite sets of pairs of n-by-n complex matrices. We describe an algorithm to determine, with finitely many computations, whether there is a single unitary matrix U such that each pair of matrices in A is unitarily…

We investigate verification and existence problems for prominent stability concepts in hedonic games with friends, enemies, and optionally with neutrals [8, 16]. We resolve several (long-standing) open questions [4, 16, 20, 23] and show…

The computation of a solution concept of a cooperative game usually employs values of all coalitions. However, in some applications, the values of some of the coalitions might be unknown due to high costs associated with their determination…

The Unique Games Conjecture (UGC) constitutes a highly dynamic subarea within computational complexity theory, intricately linked to the outstanding P versus NP problem. Despite multiple insightful results in the past few years, a proof for…