Related papers: Solitaire Mancala Games and the Chinese Remainder …
Certain endgame considerations in the two-player Nigerian Mancala-type game Ayo can be identified with the problem of finding winning positions in the solitaire game Tchoukaitlon. The periodicity of the pit occupancies in $s$ stone winning…
Markov chains are an important example for a course on stochastic processes because simple board games can be used to illustrate the fundamental concepts. For example, a looping board game (like Monopoly) consists of all recurrent states,…
We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…
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…
Dull, weak and nested solitaire games are important classes of parity games, capturing, among others, alternation-free mu-calculus and ECTL* model checking problems. These classes can be solved in polynomial time using dedicated algorithms.…
Player ONE chooses a meager set and player TWO, a nowhere dense set per inning. They play $\omega$ many innings. ONE's consecutive choices must form a (weakly) increasing sequence. TWO wins if the union of the chosen nowhere dense sets…
Competition among cooperators, defectors, and loners is studied in an evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game with optional participation. Loners are risk averse i.e. unwilling to participate and rather rely on small but fixed earnings. This…
A computation in the continuation monad returns a final result given a continuation, ie. it is a function with type $(X \to R) \to R$. If we instead return the intermediate result at $X$ then our computation is called a selection function.…
Partial order reductions have been successfully applied to model checking of concurrent systems and practical applications of the technique show nontrivial reduction in the size of the explored state space. We present a theory of partial…
The ability to prepare systems in specific target states through quantum engineering is essential for realizing the new technologies promised by a second quantum revolution. Here, we recast the fundamental problem of state preparation in…
Self-play is a technique for machine learning in multi-agent systems where a learning algorithm learns by interacting with copies of itself. Self-play is useful for generating large quantities of data for learning, but has the drawback that…
The game of Moksha-Patam, often known as `Chutes and Ladders', is a widely played indoor game worldwide. While studies have been conducted regarding the nature of an individual board, the possibilities that open up when we change the…
Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…
Generalizing the cyclically competing three-species model (often referred to as the rock-paper-scissors game), we consider a simple system of population dynamics without spatial structures that involves four species. Unlike the previous…
This brief paper describes the single-player card game called "Perpetual Motion" and reports on a computational analysis of the game's outcome. The analysis follows a Monte Carlo methodology based on a sample of 10,000 randomly generated…
Continuous games are multiplayer games in which strategy sets are compact and utility functions are continuous. These games typically have a highly complicated structure of Nash equilibria, and numerical methods for the equilibrium…
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…
Tumbleweed is a popular two-player perfect-information new territorial game played at the prestigious Mind Sport Olympiad. We define a generalized version of the game, where the board size is arbitrary and so is the possible number of…
This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…
In 1979, David Fabian found a complete game of two-person Chinese Checkers in 30 moves (15 by each player) [Martin Gardner, Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers, MAA, 1997]. This solution requires that the two players cooperate to generate a…