Related papers: Almost optimal pairing strategy for Tic-Tac-Toe wi…
We study the unbiased WalkerMaker-WalkerBreaker games on the edge set of the complete graph on $n$ vertices, $K_n$, a variant of well-known Maker-Breaker positional games, where both players have the restriction on the way of playing.…
For a positive integer $n$ and a tree $T_n$ on $n$ vertices, we consider an unbiased Waiter-Client game $\textrm{WC}(n,T_n)$ played on the complete graph~$K_n$, in which Waiter's goal is to force Client to build a copy of $T_n$. We prove…
In numerous positional games the identity of the winner is easily determined. In this case one of the more interesting questions is not {\em who} wins but rather {\em how fast} can one win. These type of problems were studied earlier for…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…
Let $G=(V,E)$ be a connected undirected graph with $k$ vertices. Suppose that on each vertex of the graph there is a player having an $n$-bit string. Each player is allowed to communicate with its neighbors according to an agreed…
The domination game is an optimization game played by two players, Dominator and Staller, who alternately select vertices in a graph $G$. A vertex is said to be dominated if it has been selected or is adjacent to a selected vertex. Each…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
Let $d(x,y)$ denote the length of a shortest path between vertices $x$ and $y$ in a graph $G$ with vertex set $V$. For a positive integer $k$, let $d_k(x,y)=\min\{d(x,y), k+1\}$ and $R_k\{x,y\}=\{z\in V: d_k(x,z) \neq d_k(y,z)\}$. A set $S…
Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…
We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs. Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability $p_{F}$ for the existence of Maker's strategy to claim a member of $F$ in the unbiased game played on…
In the symmetric rendezvous problem two players follow the same (randomized) strategy to visit one of $n$ locations in each time step $t=0,1,2,\dots$. Their goal is to minimize the expected time until they visit the same location and thus…
In this paper, we consider the problem of finding a cycle of length $2k$ (a $C_{2k}$) in an undirected graph $G$ with $n$ nodes and $m$ edges for constant $k\ge2$. A classic result by Bondy and Simonovits [J.Comb.Th.'74] implies that if $m…
A multiplayer reach-avoid game is a differential game between an attacking team with NA attackers and a defending team with ND defenders playing on a compact domain with obstacles. The attacking team aims to send M of the NA attackers to…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers; a similar result, though with a different notion of a legal decomposition, holds for many other sequences. We use these…
We analyze misere play of impartial tic-tac-toe---a game suggested by Bob Koca in which both players make X's on the board, and the first player to complete three-in-a-row loses. This game was recently discussed on mathoverflow.net in a…
Suppose a gambler starts with a fortune in (0,1) and wishes to attain a fortune of 1 by making a sequence of bets. Assume thay whenever the gambler stakes the amount s, the gambler's fortune increases by s with probability w and decreases…
Tic Tac Toe is amongst the most well-known games. It has already been shown that it is a biased game, giving more chances to win for the first player leaving only a draw or a loss as possibilities for the opponent, assuming both the players…
Decoding strategies play a pivotal role in text generation for modern language models, yet a puzzling gap divides theory and practice. Surprisingly, strategies that should intuitively be optimal, such as Maximum a Posteriori (MAP), often…
We revisit the problem of designing optimal, individually rational matching mechanisms (in a general sense, allowing for cycles in directed graphs), where each player --- who is associated with a subset of vertices --- matches as many of…
We consider a deterministic game with alternate moves and complete information, of which the issue is always the victory of one of the two opponents. We assume that this game is the realization of a random model enjoying some independence…