Related papers: Alternating Traps in Muller and Parity Games
We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…
We revisit the coalition structure generation problem in which the goal is to partition the players into exhaustive and disjoint coalitions so as to maximize the social welfare. One of our key results is a general polynomial-time algorithm…
Parity games have witnessed several new quasi-polynomial algorithms since the breakthrough result of Calude et al. (STOC 2017). The combinatorial object underlying these approaches is a universal tree, as identified by Czerwi\'nski et al.…
Partial methods play an important role in formal methods and beyond. Recently such methods were developed for parity games, where polynomial-time partial solvers decide the winners of a subset of nodes. We investigate here how effective…
The localization game is a two player combinatorial game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The cops choose a set of vertices $S_1 \subseteq V$ with $|S_1|=k$. The robber then chooses a vertex $v \in V$ whose location is hidden from the cops, but…
Since its introduction as a Maker-Breaker positional game by Duch\^ene et al. in 2020, the Maker-Breaker domination game has become one of the most studied positional games on vertices. In this game, two players, Dominator and Staller,…
Baker devised a technique to obtain approximation schemes for many optimization problems restricted to planar graphs; her technique was later extended to more general graph classes. In particular, using the Baker's technique and the minor…
We introduce a new two-player game on graphs, in which players alternate choosing vertices until the set of chosen vertices forms a dominating set. The last player to choose a vertex is the winner. The game fits into the scheme of several…
We consider parity games on infinite graphs where configurations are represented by control-states and integer vectors. This framework subsumes two classic game problems: parity games on vector addition systems with states (vass) and…
Graph Exploration problems ask a searcher to explore an unknown environment. The environment is modeled as a graph, where the searcher needs to visit each vertex beginning at some vertex. Treasure Hunt problems are a variation of Graph…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
Infinitely repeated games support equilibrium concepts beyond those present in one-shot games (e.g., cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma). Nonetheless, repeated games fail to capture our real-world intuition for settings with many…
The original Parrondo game, denoted as AB3, contains two independent games: A and B. The winning or losing of A and B game is defined by the change of one unit of capital. Game A is a losing game if played continuously, with winning…
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 study computational problems arising from the iterated removal of weakly dominated actions in anonymous games. Our main result shows that it is NP-complete to decide whether an anonymous game with three actions can be solved via iterated…
The Maker-Breaker domination game is a positional game played on a graph by two players called Dominator and Staller. The players alternately select a vertex of the graph that has not yet been chosen. Dominator wins if at some point the…
Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value…
The classical Maker-Breaker positional game is played on a board which is a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, with two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately claiming vertices of $\mathcal{H}$ until all the vertices are claimed. When the game…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner of the game. Such games are central in formal methods since they model the interaction between a…