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We construct several definitions of imbalance and playability, both of which are related to the existence of dominated strategies. Specifically, a maximally balanced game and a playable game cannot have dominated strategies for any player.…
We look at the unbiased Maker-Breaker Hamiltonicity game played on the edge set of a complete graph $K_n$, where Maker's goal is to claim a Hamiltonian cycle. First, we prove that, independent of who starts, Maker can win the game for $n =…
In multiplayer games with sequential decision-making, self-interested players form dynamic coalitions to achieve most-preferred temporal goals beyond their individual capabilities. We introduce a novel procedure to synthesize strategies…
We present a new variant of the potential game and show that certain compact subsets of $\R^n$, including a large class of self-affine sets, are winning in our game. We prove that sets with sufficiently strong winning conditions are…
We initiate the study of a new variant of the Maker-Breaker positional game, which we call multistage game. Given a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}=(\mathcal{X},\mathcal{F})$ and a bias $b \ge 1$, the $(1:b)$ multistage Maker-Breaker game on…
Often, a given selection game studied in the literature has a known dual game. In dual games, a winning strategy for a player in either game may be used to create a winning strategy for the opponent in the dual. For example, the Rothberger…
Motivated by auto-proof generation and Valiant's VP vs. VNP conjecture, we study the problem of discovering efficient arithmetic circuits to compute polynomials, using addition and multiplication gates. We formulate this problem as a…
Maker-Breaker games are played on a hypergraph $(X,\mathcal{F})$, where $\mathcal{F} \subseteq 2^X$ denotes the family of winning sets. Both players alternately claim a predefined amount of edges (called bias) from the board $X$, and Maker…
This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…
A zero-one matrix $A$ contains another zero-one matrix $P$ if some submatrix of $A$ can be transformed to $P$ by changing some ones to zeros. $A$ avoids $P$ if $A$ does not contain $P$. The Pattern Avoidance Game is played by two players.…
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…
Parity games play an important role in model checking and synthesis. In their paper, Calude et al. have shown that these games can be solved in quasi-polynomial time. We show that their algorithm can be implemented efficiently: we use their…
In the Maker-Breaker positional game, Maker and Breaker take turns picking vertices of a hypergraph $H$, and Maker wins if and only if she possesses all the vertices of some edge of $H$. Deciding the outcome (i.e. which player has a winning…
This paper is concerned with asymptotic behaviour of a repeated game of "odds and evens", with strategies of both players represented by finite automata. It is proved that, for every $n$, there is an automaton with $2^n \cdot…
Consider the following one-player game. Take a well-formed sequence of opening and closing brackets. As a move, the player can pair any opening bracket with any closing bracket to its right, erasing them. The goal is to re-pair (erase) the…
Consider QBF, the Quantified Boolean Formula problem, as a combinatorial game ruleset. The problem is rephrased as determining the winner of the game where two opposing players take turns assigning values to boolean variables. In this…
We consider some Maker-Breaker games of the following flavor. We have some set $V$ of items for purchase. Maker's goal is to purchase some member of a given family $\cH$ of subsets of $V$ as cheaply as possible and Breaker's goal is to make…
We introduce a new positional game called `Toucher-Isolator', which is a quantitative version of a Maker-Breaker type game. The playing board is the set of edges of a given graph G, and the two players, Toucher and Isolator, claim edges…
For a positive integer $k$ we consider the $k$-vertex-connectivity game, played on the edge set of $K_n$, the complete graph on $n$ vertices. We first study the Maker-Breaker version of this game and prove that, for any integer $k \geq 2$…
We consider two-player partial-observation stochastic games on finite-state graphs where player 1 has partial observation and player 2 has perfect observation. The winning condition we study are \omega-regular conditions specified as parity…