Related papers: Complete Solutions for a Combinatorial Puzzle in L…
Connect Four is a two-player game where each player attempts to be the first to create a sequence of four of their pieces, arranged horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, by dropping pieces into the columns of a grid of width seven and…
We play a variation of Nim on stacks of tokens. Take your favorite increasing sequence of positive integers and color the tokens according to the following rule. Each token on a level that corresponds to a number in the sequence is colored…
We study a game puzzle that has enjoyed recent popularity among mathematicians, computer scientist, coding theorists and even the mass press. In the game, $n$ players are fitted with randomly assigned colored hats. Individual players can…
Consider a randomly shuffled deck of $2n$ cards with $n$ red cards and $n$ black cards. We study the average number of moves it takes to go from a randomly shuffled deck to a deck that alternates in color by performing the following move:…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
A naive way to solve the model-checking problem of the mu-calculus uses fixpoint iteration. Traditionally however mu-calculus model-checking is solved by a reduction in linear time to a parity game, which is then solved using one of the…
Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…
In a vector balancing game, on step $k$ player 1 chooses a unit vector $v_k$ and player 2 chooses a sign $\varepsilon_k\in \{-1,1\}$, and the position after $n$ steps is $z_n=\sum_1^n\varepsilon_k v_k$. Player 1's target is to make…
We combine the ideas of edge coloring games and asymmetric graph coloring games and define the \emph{$(m,1)$-edge coloring game}, which is alternatively played by two players Maker and Breaker on a finite simple graph $G$ with a set of…
The domination game is played on a graph $G$ by two players, Dominator and Staller, who alternate in selecting vertices until each vertex in the graph $G$ is contained in the closed neighbourhood of the set of selected vertices. Dominator's…
Small Progress Measures is one of the classical parity game solving algorithms. For games with n vertices, m edges and d different priorities, the original algorithm computes the winning regions and a winning strategy for one of the players…
We consider various probabilistic games with piles for one player or two players. In each round of the game, a player randomly chooses to add $a$ or $b$ chips to his pile under the condition that $a$ and $b$ are not necessarily positive. If…
We study the Torus Puzzle, a solitaire game in which the elements of an input $m \times n$ matrix need to be rearranged into a target configuration via a sequence of unit rotations (i.e., circular shifts) of rows and/or columns. Amano et…
We study a recently introduced two-person combinatorial game, the $(a,b)$-monochromatic clique transversal game which is played by Alice and Bob on a graph $G$. As we observe, this game is equivalent to the $(b,a)$-biased Maker-Breaker game…
Regular games form a well-established class of games for analysis and synthesis of reactive systems. They include coloured Muller games, McNaughton games, Muller games, Rabin games, and Streett games. These games are played on directed…
We study a novel control problem in the context of network coordination games: the individuation of the smallest set of players capable of driving the system, globally, from one Nash equilibrium to another one. Our main contribution is the…
We consider a repeated Matching Pennies game in which players have limited access to randomness. Playing the (unique) Nash equilibrium in this n-stage game requires n random bits. Can there be Nash equilibria that use less than n random…
In this paper we will discuss scoring play games. We will give the basic definitions for scoring play games, and show that they form a well defined set, with clear and distinct outcome classes under these definitions. We will also show that…
Von Neumann's Min-Max Theorem guarantees that each player of a zero-sum matrix game has an optimal mixed strategy. This paper gives an elementary proof that each player has a near-optimal mixed strategy that chooses uniformly at random from…
Combinatorial Game Theory typically studies sequential rulesets with perfect information where two players alternate moves. There are rulesets with {\em entailing moves} that break the alternating play axiom and/or restrict the other…