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Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-01-29 Urban Larsson , Richard J. Nowakowski , Carlos P. Santos

By treating combinatorial games as dynamical systems, we are able to address a longstanding open question in combinatorial game theory, namely, how the introduction of a "pass" move into a game affects its behavior. We consider two well…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-04-17 Rebecca E. Morrison , Eric J. Friedman , Adam S. Landsberg

The Sprague-Grundy (SG) theory reduces the sum of impartial games to the classical game of $NIM$. We generalize the concept of sum and introduce $\cH$-combinations of impartial games for any hypergraph $\cH$. In particular, we introduce the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-01-12 Endre Boros , Vladimir Gurvich , Nhan Bao Ho , Kazuhisa Makino , Peter Mursic

In 1901, Bouton proved that a winning strategy of the game of Nim is given by the bitwise XOR, called the nim-sum. But, why does such a weird binary operation work? Led by this question, this paper introduces a categorical reinterpretation…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Ryuya Hora

We study two impartial games introduced by Anderson and Harary and further developed by Barnes. Both games are played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-02-12 Dana C. Ernst , Nandor Sieben

This work is concerned with the study of the Game of Graph Nim -- a class of two-player combinatorial games -- on graphs with $4$ edges. To each edge of such a graph is assigned a positive-integer-valued edge-weight, and during each round…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-08 Sayar Karmakar , Moumanti Podder , Souvik Roy , Soumyarup Sadhukhan

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-17 Aidan Hennessey

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Nanako Omiya , Ryo Yoshinaka , Ayumi Shinohara

The study of the combinatorial game Nim and its variants is rich and varied, but little is known of the game Nim with a Pass. It is Nim, but once per game a player is permitted to skip their turn but this can only be done if a nonempty pile…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-10-22 Emet Hirsch

We introduce the notion of invariant vectors of a game and develop the Invariance Reduction Process, which first uses reduction of positions via invariance and then zero and merge reductions of games to arrive at smaller, solved sub-games…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-06 Balaji R. Kadam , Matthieu Dufour , Silvia Heubach

We build off the game, NimG to create a version named Neighboring Nim. By reducing from Geography, we show that this game is PSPACE-hard. The games created by the reduction share strong similarities with Undirected (Vertex) Geography and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-10-08 Kyle Burke , Olivia George

We introduce Row Impartial Terminus (RIT), an impartial combinatorial game played on integer partitions. We show that any position in RIT can be uniquely decomposed into a core and a remnant. Our central result is that the Conway pair of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Eric Gottlieb , Dawood Khatana , Matjaž Krnc , Peter Muršič , Ismael Qureshi

The class of Guaranteed Scoring Games (GS) are two-player combinatorial games with the property that Normal-play games (Conway et. al.) are ordered embedded into GS. They include, as subclasses, the scoring games considered by Milnor…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-06-01 Urban Larsson , João P. Neto , Richard J. Nowakowski , Carlos P. Santos

The concept of nimbers--a.k.a. Grundy-values or nim-values--is fundamental to combinatorial game theory. Nimbers provide a complete characterization of strategic interactions among impartial games in their disjunctive sums as well as the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Kyle Burke , Matthew Ferland , Shanghua Teng

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-07-11 Nathan Fox

The Grundy number of an impartial game G is the size of the unique Nim heap equal to G. We introduce a new variant of Nim, Restricted Nim, which restricts the number of stones a player may remove from a heap in terms of the size of the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Lionel Levine

We introduce the category of optiongraphs and option-preserving maps as a model to study impartial combinatorial games. Outcomes, remoteness, and extended nim-values are preserved under option-preserving maps. We show that the four…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-23 Mikhail Baltushkin , Dana C. Ernst , Nándor Sieben

A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-27 Kengo Hashimoto

The ordinary game of Nim has a long history and is well-known in the area of combinatorial game theory. The solution to the ordinary game of Nim has been known for many years and lends itself to numerous other solutions to combinatorial…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-08-29 Lindsay Erickson , Warren Shreve

There are many combinatorial games in which a move can terminate the game, such as a checkmate in chess. These moves give rise to diverse situations that fall outside the scope of the classical normal play structure. To analyze these games,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-02-09 Urban Larsson , Richard J. Nowakowski , Carlos P. Santos
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