Related papers: Musical chairs

Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers. We use this to create a two-player game. Given a fixed integer $n$ and an initial decomposition of $n = n F_1$, the two…

Each period, two players bargain over a unit of surplus. Each player chooses between remaining flexible and committing to a take-it-or-leave-it offer at a cost. If players' committed demands are incompatible, then the current-period surplus…

The domination game is an optimization game played by two players, Dominator and Staller, who alternately select vertices in a graph $G$. A vertex is said to be dominated if it has been selected or is adjacent to a selected vertex. Each…

We consider a general class of round-robin tournament models of equally strong players. In these models, each of the $n$ players competes against every other player exactly once. For each match between two players, the outcome is a value…

We consider a repeated game in which players, considered as nodes of a network, are connected. Each player observes her neighbors' moves only. Thus, monitoring is private and imperfect. Players can communicate with their neighbors at each…

We show that, in John Conway's board game Phutball (or Philosopher's Football), it is NP-complete to determine whether the current player has a move that immediately wins the game. In contrast, the similar problems of determining whether…

We propose a class of chess variants, Multimove Chess (i,j), in which White gets i moves per turn and Black gets j moves per turn. One side is said to win when it takes the opponent's king. All other rules of chess apply. We prove that if…

A group of $n$ agents with numerical preferences for each other are to be assigned to the $n$ seats of a dining table. We study two natural topologies:~circular (cycle) tables and panel (path) tables. For a given seating arrangement, an…

We analyze the domination game, where two players, Dominator and Staller, construct together a dominating set M in a given graph, by alternately selecting vertices into M. Each move must increase the size of the dominated set. The players…

The Rock-Scissors-Paper game has been studied to account for cyclic behaviour under various game dynamics. We use a two-person parametrised version of this game. The cyclic behaviour is observed near a heteroclinic cycle, in a heteroclinic…

A recent paper by Bhatia, Chin, Mani, and Mossel (2026) defined stochastic processes aimed at modeling the game of War for {\em two players} with $n$ cards. That paper showed that these models, assuming uniform random decks, are equivalent…

There are two well-known sufficient conditions for Nash equilibrium in two-player games: mutual knowledge of rationality (MKR) and mutual knowledge of conjectures. MKR assumes that the concept of rationality is mutually known. In contrast,…

In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…

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 formulate and study a two-player static duel game as a nonzero-sum discounted stochastic game. Players $P_{1},P_{2}$ are standing in place and, in each turn, one or both may shoot at the other player. If $P_{n}$ shoots at $P_{m}$ ($m\neq…

We consider the manipulability of tournament rules for round-robin tournaments of $n$ competitors. Specifically, $n$ competitors are competing for a prize, and a tournament rule $r$ maps the result of all $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches…

For positive integers $n$ and $q$ and a monotone graph property $\cA$, we consider the two player, perfect information game $\WC(n,q,\cA)$, which is defined as follows. The game proceeds in rounds. In each round, the first player, called…

In this paper the results of a simulation of a prisoner's dilemma robin-round tournament are presented. In the tournament each participating strategy plays an iterated prisoner's dilemma against each other strategy (round-robin) and as a…

In this note we discuss a theory of combinatorial games that involve transmitting the moves through a noisy channel that can introduce errors during the transmission. Players are aware of this interference and incorporate this variable into…

In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the game. Such games are central in formal verification since they model the interaction between a…