Related papers: Nimbers are inevitable
We consider a sub-class of bi-matrix games which we refer to as two-person (hereafter referred to as two-player) additively-separable sum (TPASS) games, where the sum of the pay-offs of the two players is additively separable. The row…
Something is definitely wrong. If the game has a linear winning strategy, then it is tractable. What's going on? Well, we describe a two-person game which has a definite winner, that is, a player who can force a win in a finite number of…
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…
We survey recent developments in the theory of impartial combinatorial games in misere play, focusing on how the Sprague-Grundy theory of normal-play impartial games generalizes to misere play via the indistinguishability quotient…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
We provide supplementary appendices to the paper Misere quotients for impartial games. These include detailed solutions to many of the octal games discussed in the paper, and descriptions of the algorithms used to compute most of our…
We introduce and analyse an extension of the disjunctive sum operation on some classical impartial games. Whereas the disjunctive sum describes positions formed from independent subpositions, our operation combines positions that are not…
A poset game is a two-player game played over a partially ordered set (poset) in which the players alternate choosing an element of the poset, removing it and all elements greater than it. The first player unable to select an element of the…
This paper introduces a novel algorithm for two-player deterministic games with perfect information, which we call PROBS (Predict Results of Beam Search). Unlike existing methods that predominantly rely on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for…
We study 2-player impartial games of the form take-away which produce P-positions (second player winning positions) corresponding to complementary Beatty sequences, given by the continued fractions (1;k,1,k,1,...) and (k+1;k,1,k,1,...). Our…
We define a two-player combinatorial game in which players take alternate turns; each turn consists on deleting a vertex of a graph, together with all the edges containing such vertex. If any vertex became isolated by a player's move then…
In this paper, we considered impartial games on a simplicial complex. Each vertex of a given simplicial complex acts as a position of an impartial game. Each player in turn chooses a face of the simplicial complex and, for each position on…
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The disjunctive sum $G + H$ of games $G$ and $H$ is the game in which $G$ and $H$ are played in parallel, and a player makes a move on exactly one of…
Regular games form a well-established class of games for analysis and synthesis of reactive systems. They include coloured Muller games, McNaughton games, Muller games, Rabin games, and Streett games. These games are played on directed…
Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…
We encode arbitrary finite impartial combinatorial games in terms of lattice points in rational convex polyhedra. Encodings provided by these \emph{lattice games} can be made particularly efficient for octal games, which we generalize to…
We propose an interpretation of the infinite sum of combinatorial games. In such an interpretation, plays involve infinite runs, but without loops. The notion of a run is quite natural, but different possibilities arises for the notion of…
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,…
In this paper we consider ordinal sums of combinatorial games where each summand is a number, not necessarily in canonical form. In doing so we give formulas for the value of an ordinal sum of numbers where the literal form of the base has…