Related papers: Complete Solutions for a Combinatorial Puzzle in L…
Consider the following game played by Maker and Breaker on the vertices of the cycle $C_{n}$, with first move given to Breaker. The aim of Maker is to maximise the number of adjacent pairs of vertices that are both claimed by her, and the…
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…
The Levine hat game requires $n$ players, each wearing an infinite random stack of black and white hats, to guess the location of a black hat on their own head seeing only the hats worn by all the other players. They are allowed a strategy…
Consider a two-person zero-sum search game between a Hider and a Searcher. The Hider chooses to hide in one of $n$ discrete locations (or "boxes") and the Searcher chooses a search sequence specifying which order to look in these boxes…
Simple games cover voting systems in which a single alternative, such as a bill or an amendment, is pitted against the status quo. A simple game or a yes-no voting system is a set of rules that specifies exactly which collections of ``yea''…
"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…
Consider the following game between a random player R and a deterministic player D. There is a pile of n elements at the beginning. The rules for playing are as follows: In each turn of R, if the pile contains exactly m elements, R removes…
The classic game of Nim has been well-known for many years, inspiring numerous variations. One such variant is Delete Nim, where players take turns eliminating one pile of stones and splitting the remaining pile into two smaller piles. In…
This paper investigates repeated win-lose coordination games (WLC-games). We analyse which protocols are optimal for these games covering both the worst case and average case scenarios, i,e., optimizing the guaranteed and expected…
Bidding chess is a chess variant where instead of alternating play, players bid for the opportunity to move. Generalizing a known result on so-called Richman games, we show that for a natural class of games including bidding chess, each…
We introduce and analyze the ordered Zeckendorf game, a novel combinatorial two-player game inspired by Zeckendorf's Theorem, which guarantees a unique decomposition of every positive integer as a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers.…
We consider the following two-player game: Maxi and Mini start with the empty graph on $n$ vertices and take turns, always adding one additional edge to the graph such that the chromatic number is at most $k$, where $k \in \mathbb{N}$ is a…
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…
Consider a two-person zero-sum search game between a hider and a searcher. The hider hides among $n$ discrete locations, and the searcher successively visits individual locations until finding the hider. Known to both players, a search at…
Normally a chess problem must have a unique solution, and is deemed unsound even if there are alternatives that differ only in the order in which the same moves are played. In an enumerative chess problem, the set of moves in the solution…
Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…
We study so-called invariant games played with a fixed number $d$ of heaps of matches. A game is described by a finite list $\mathcal{M}$ of integer vectors of length $d$ specifying the legal moves. A move consists in changing the current…
We study the biased $(1:b)$ Maker--Breaker positional games, played on the edge set of the complete graph on $n$ vertices, $K_n$. Given Breaker's bias $b$, possibly depending on $n$, we determine the bounds for the minimal number of moves,…
We consider a deterministic game with alternate moves and complete information, of which the issue is always the victory of one of the two opponents. We assume that this game is the realization of a random model enjoying some independence…
Consider a situation with $n$ agents or players where some of the players form a coalition with a certain collective objective. Simple games are used to model systems that can decide whether coalitions are successful (winning) or not…