Related papers: The mathematics of Spinpossible
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
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 consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
In this paper we provide a case study of the use of relatively sophisticated mathematics and algorithms to redefine and adapt a simple traditional game/puzzle to exploit the computational power of smart devices. The focus here is not so…
In this paper we introduce polytopal stochastic games, an extension of two-player, zero-sum, turn-based stochastic games, in which we may have uncertainty over the transition probabilities. In these games the uncertainty over the…
We introduce and analyze several variations of Penney's game aimed to find a more equitable game.
We establish that the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) threshold problem for mean-payoff games is NP-complete. While the SPE threshold problem was recently shown to be decidable (in doubly exponential time) and NP-hard, its exact worst…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of triangular Ramsey numbers and provide values as well as upper and lower bounds for them. To do this, the combinatorial game Mines is introduced; after some necessary theorems about…
The optimal value computation for turned-based stochastic games with reachability objectives, also known as simple stochastic games, is one of the few problems in $NP \cap coNP$ which are not known to be in $P$. However, there are some…
We introduce and study Minkowski games. These are two player games, where the players take turns to chose positions in $\mathbb{R}^d$ based on some rules. Variants include boundedness games, where one player wants to keep the positions…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
We consider a randomized algorithm for the unique games problem, using independent multinomial probabilities to assign labels to the vertices of a graph. The expected value of the solution obtained by the algorithm is expressed as a…
In this paper, some new criteria for detecting whether a finite game is potential are proposed by solving potential equations. The verification equations with the minimal number for checking a potential game are obtained for the first time.…
Bounds for the optimal tour length for a hypothetical TSP algorithm are derived.
The Nakamura number is an appropriate invariant of a simple game to study the existence of social equilibria and the possibility of cycles. For symmetric quota games its number can be obtained by an easy formula. For some subclasses of…
In this paper we survey the computational time complexity of assorted simple stochastic game problems, and we give an overview of the best known algorithms associated with each problem.
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
We determine the optimal bound for the maximum number of moves required to reach a periodic configuration of open mancala (also called open owari), inspired by a popular African game. A mancala move can be interpreted as a map from the set…