Related papers: Playing simple loony dots and boxes endgames optim…

We give very simple algorithms for best play in the simplest kind of Dots & Boxes endgames: those that consist entirely of loops and long chains. In every such endgame we compute the margin of victory, assuming both players maximize the…

Two-player complete-information game trees are perhaps the simplest possible setting for studying general-sum games and the computational problem of finding equilibria. These games admit a simple bottom-up algorithm for finding subgame…

Stochastic games are an important class of problems that generalize Markov decision processes to game theoretic scenarios. We consider finite state two-player zero-sum stochastic games over an infinite time horizon with discounted rewards.…

Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…

Dots-and-Boxes is a child's game which remains analytically unsolved. We implement and evolve artificial neural networks to play this game, evaluating them against simple heuristic players. Our networks do not evaluate or predict the final…

We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…

We consider a randomized algorithm for the unique games problem, using independent multinomial probabilities to assign labels to the vertices of a graph. The expected value of the solution obtained by the algorithm is expressed as a…

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…

Dynamic zero-sum games are an important class of problems with applications ranging from evasion-pursuit and heads-up poker to certain adversarial versions of control problems such as multi-armed bandit and multiclass queuing problems.…

We introduce a new approach for computing optimal equilibria via learning in games. It applies to extensive-form settings with any number of players, including mechanism design, information design, and solution concepts such as correlated,…

Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…

We introduce a simple extensive-form algorithm for finding equilibria of two-player, zero-sum games. The algorithm is realization equivalent to a generalized form of Fictitious Play. We compare its performance to that of a similar…

Box-simplex games are a family of bilinear minimax objectives which encapsulate graph-structured problems such as maximum flow [She17], optimal transport [JST19], and bipartite matching [AJJ+22]. We develop efficient near-linear time,…

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…

In this paper we survey the computational time complexity of assorted simple stochastic game problems, and we give an overview of the best known algorithms associated with each problem.

The recent popularity of Wordle has revived interest in guessing games. We develop a general method for finding optimal strategies for guessing games while avoiding an exhaustive search. Our main contributions are several theorems that…

Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player zero-sum graph games with a reachability objective. The problem is to compute the winning probability as well as the optimal strategies of both players. In this paper, we compare the three…

We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…

In this paper we introduce polytopal stochastic games, an extension of two-player, zero-sum, turn-based stochastic games, in which we may have uncertainty over the transition probabilities. In these games the uncertainty over the…

We design and analyze minimax-optimal algorithms for online linear optimization games where the player's choice is unconstrained. The player strives to minimize regret, the difference between his loss and the loss of a post-hoc benchmark…