Related papers: A New Algorithm for the Subtraction Games
In many combinatorial games, one can prove that the first player wins under best play using a simple but non-constructive argument called strategy-stealing. This work is about the complexity behind these proofs: how hard is it to actually…
Poset games are a class of combinatorial game that remain unsolved. Soltys and Wilson proved that computing wining strategies is in \textbf{PSPACE} and aside from special cases such as Nim and N-Free games, \textbf{P} time algorithms for…
In an all-pay auction, only one bidder wins but all bidders must pay the auctioneer. All-pay bidding games arise from attaching a similar bidding structure to traditional combinatorial games to determine which player moves next. In contrast…
The game of i-Mark is an impartial combinatorial game introduced by Sopena (2016). The game is parametrized by two sets of positive integers $S$, $D$, where $\min D\ge 2$. From position $n\ge 0$ one can move to any position $n-s$, $s\in S$,…
We study zero-sum games, a variant of the classical combinatorial Subtraction games (studied for example in the monumental work "Winning Ways", by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy), called Cumulative Subtraction (CS). Two players alternate in…
In this paper, we introduce a variant of Francis Su's "Game of Cycles," that we call "Cycles with Sources." The only change to the rules is permitting nodes to be sources, while sinks are still prohibited. Despite this minor change in the…
By resorting to the vector space structure of finite games, skew-symmetric games (SSGs) are proposed and investigated as a natural subspace of finite games. First of all, for two player games, it is shown that the skew-symmetric games form…
Subtraction games have a rich literature as normal-play combinatorial games (e.g., Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy, 1982). Recently, the theory has been extended to zero-sum scoring play (Cohensius et al. 2019). Here, we take the approach of…
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…
The most important factors which contribute to the efficiency of game-theoretical algorithms are time and game complexity. In this study, we have offered an elegant method to deal with high complexity of game theoretic multi-objective…
We find the winning strategy for a class of truncation games played on words. As a consequence of the present author's recent results on some of these games we obtain new formulas for Bernoulli numbers and polynomials of the second kind and…
Simple stochastic games are two-player zero-sum stochastic games with turn-based moves, perfect information, and reachability winning conditions. We present two new algorithms computing the values of simple stochastic games. Both of them…
This paper provides effective methods for the polyhedral formulation of impartial finite combinatorial games as lattice games. Given a rational strategy for a lattice game, a polynomial time algorithm is presented to decide (i) whether a…
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…
For impartial games $\Gamma$ and $\Gamma'$, the Sprague-Grundy function of the disjunctive sum $\Gamma + \Gamma'$ is equal to the Nim-sum of their Sprague-Grundy functions. In this paper, we introduce $p$-calm subtraction games, and show…
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…
Subset take-away is a two-player game involving a fixed finite set A. Players alternate choosing a proper, non-empty subset of A, with the condition that one may not name a set containing a set that was named earlier. A player unable to…
Subtraction games are a classical topic in Combinatorial Game Theory. A result of Golomb~(1966) shows that every subtraction game with a finite move set has an eventually periodic nim-sequence, but the known proof yields only an exponential…
Compositional Game Theory is a new, recently introduced model of economic games based upon the computer science idea of compositionality. In it, complex and irregular games can be built up from smaller and simpler games, and the equilibria…
Given two finite sets of integers $S\subseteq\NNN\setminus\{0\}$ and $D\subseteq\NNN\setminus\{0,1\}$,the impartial combinatorial game $\IMARK(S,D)$ is played on a heap of tokens. From a heap of $n$ tokens, each player can moveeither to a…