Related papers: Nimbers are inevitable
When are all positions of a game numbers? We show that two properties are necessary and sufficient. These properties are consequences of that, in a number, it is not an advantage to be the first player. One of these properties implies the…
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…
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…
This paper introduces a variant of the impartial combinatorial game nim, called tree nim, as well as a particular case of tree nim called tripod nim. A certain existence-uniqueness result and a periodicity result are proven about the…
We study an impartial avoidance game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The game is played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who cannot select an element without making…
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. One of the major approaches to analyzing games in combinatorial game theory is to break down a given game position into a disjunctive sum of multiple…
First, we consider the problem of deciding whether a nonlocal game admits a perfect entangled strategy that uses projective measurements on a maximally entangled shared state. Via a polynomial-time Karp reduction, we show that independent…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
We show that it is decidable whether two regular languages of infinite trees are separable by a deterministic language, resp., a game language. We consider two variants of separability, depending on whether the set of priorities of the…
In this paper, we analyze the mis\`ere versions of two impartial combinatorial games: k-Bounded Greedy Nim and Greedy Nim. We present a complete solution to both games by showing necessary and sufficient conditions for a position to be…
We study the effectiveness of iterated elimination of strictly-dominated actions in random games. We show that dominance solvability of games is vanishingly small as the number of at least one player's actions grows. Furthermore,…
Circular Nim is a two-player impartial combinatorial game consisting of $n$ stacks of tokens placed in a circle. A move consists of choosing $k$ consecutive stacks and taking at least one token from one or more of the stacks. The last…
We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can…
Poset games are a class of combinatorial game that remain unsolved. Soltys and Wilson proved that computing wining strategies is in \textbf{PSPACE} and aside from special cases such as Nim and N-Free games, \textbf{P} time algorithms for…
We consider the class of "well-tempered" integer-valued scoring games, which have the property that the parity of the length of the game is independent of the line of play. We consider disjunctive sums of these games, and develop a theory…
We consider a setting in which a principal gets to choose which game from some given set is played by a group of agents. The principal would like to choose a game that favors one of the players, the social preferences of the players, or the…
An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…
Subtraction games are a class of impartial combinatorial games whose positions correspond to nonnegative integers and whose moves correspond to subtracting one of a fixed set of numbers from the current position. Though they are easy to…
We define the family of {\it locally path-bounded} digraphs, which is a class of infinite digraphs, and show that on this class it is relatively easy to compute an optimal strategy (winning or nonlosing); and realize a win, when possible,…
Scoring play games were first studied by Fraser Stewart for his PhD thesis. He showed that under the disjunctive sum, scoring play games are partially ordered, but do not have the same "nice" structure of normal play games. In this paper I…