Related papers: Computer analysis of Sprouts with nimbers
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into fabrics of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it [1]. This research work is a mere effort for automated decision making during sports of…
Games are useful tools for introducing new concepts to students. This paper describes a competitive two-player game for sophomore students in a modern physics survey course or junior/senior students in an introductory quantum mechanics…
Juniper Green is a simple combinatorial game invented by Rob Porteous and popularized by Ian Stewart. It was originally designed to familiarize school children with the concepts of multiplication and division. We analyze this elementary…
Mastermind is a popular board game released in 1971, where a codemaker chooses a secret pattern of colored pegs, and a codebreaker has to guess it in several trials. After each attempt, the codebreaker gets a response from the codemaker…
In 1876, Lewis Carroll proposed a voting system in which the winner is the candidate who with the fewest changes in voters' preferences becomes a Condorcet winner---a candidate who beats all other candidates in pairwise majority-rule…
We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…
In a strong game played on the edge set of a graph G there are two players, Red and Blue, alternating turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of G (with Red playing first). The winner is the first one to claim all the edges of some…
We study two-player games with alternating moves played on infinite trees. Our main focus is on the case where the trees are full (regular) and the winning set is open (with respect to the product topology on the tree). Gale and Stewart…
We apply the Sprague-Grundy Theorem to LCTR, a new impartial game on partitions in which players take turns removing either the Left Column or the Top Row of the corresponding Young diagram. We establish that the Sprague-Grundy value of any…
We consider concurrent games played on graphs. At every round of a game, each player simultaneously and independently selects a move; the moves jointly determine the transition to a successor state. Two basic objectives are the safety…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity. It has served to study human behavior from the perspective of a wide number of disciplines, from cognitive skills such as memory and learning, to…
We propose the ``Competing Salesmen Problem'' (CSP), a 2-player competitive version of the classical Traveling Salesman Problem. This problem arises when considering two competing salesmen instead of just one. The concern for a shortest…
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…
Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…
On a semi-infinite strip of squares rightward numbered $0, 1, 2, \ldots$ with at most one coin in each square, in Welter's game, two players alternately move a coin to an empty square on its left. Jumping over other coins is legal. The…
Suppose an escaping player ("human") moves continuously at maximum speed $1$ in the interior of a region, while a pursuing player ("zombie") moves continuously at maximum speed $r$ outside the region. For what $r$ can the first player…
Kakutani's Fixed Point theorem is a fundamental theorem in topology with numerous applications in game theory and economics. Computational formulations of Kakutani exist only in special cases and are too restrictive to be useful in…
Strategy improvement is a widely-used and well-studied class of algorithms for solving graph-based infinite games. These algorithms are parameterized by a switching rule, and one of the most natural rules is "all switches" which switches as…
Arithmetic functions in Number Theory meet the Sprague-Grundy function from Combinatorial Game Theory. We study a variety of 2-player games induced by standard arithmetic functions, such as Euclidian division, divisors, remainders and…