Related papers: Gardner's Minichess Variant is solved

We study a variant of the classical Wythoff's game. The classical form is played with two piles of stones, from which two players take turns to remove stones from one or both piles. When removing stones from both piles, an equal number must…

This short communication shows that the Chessography encryption scheme is incorrect, redundant, and the the security claims based on the complexity of chess games are unjustified. It also demonstrates an insufficient randomness in the final…

We introduce the game of infinite Hex, extending the familiar finite game to natural play on the infinite hexagonal lattice. Whereas the finite game is a win for the first player, we prove in contrast that infinite Hex is a draw -- both…

Domineering is a two player game played on a checkerboard in which one player places dominoes vertically and the other places them horizontally. We give bivariate generating polynomials enumerating Domineering positions by the number of…

Proportional choosability is a list analogue of equitable coloring that was introduced in 2019. The smallest $k$ for which a graph $G$ is proportionally $k$-choosable is the proportional choice number of $G$, and it is denoted…

We present a new tool for the study of multiplayer stochastic games, namely the modified game, which is a normal-form game that depends on the discount factor, the initial state, and for every player a partition of the set of states and a…

Inspired by a chessboard puzzle of Dudeney, the general position problem in graph theory asks for a largest set $S$ of vertices in a graph such that no three elements of $S$ lie on a common shortest path. The number of vertices in such a…

The metric MinDist, introduced recently to quantify the distance of an arbitrary Rummy hand from a valid declaration, plays a central role in algorithmic hand evaluation and optimal play. Existing results show that the MinDist of any…

A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…

We introduce a two player game on an n x n chessboard where queens are placed by alternating turns on a chessboard square whose availability is determined by the number of queens already on the board which can attack that square modulo two.…

In this article, we describe the solution of the Juniper Green game for every integer, with techniques that are elementary enough to be explained to students who have mastered the notions of divisors and multiples. A general method allows…

Minority game is a model of heterogeneous players who think inductively. In this game, each player chooses one out of two alternatives every turn and those who end up in the minority side wins. It is instructive to extend the minority game…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…

A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…

A proper vertex coloring of a graph $G$ is equitable if the sizes of color classes differ by at most one. The equitable chromatic threshold $\chi_{eq}^*(G)$ of $G$ is the smallest integer $m$ such that $G$ is equitably $n$-colorable for all…

In this paper a relationship is established between the domination game and minimal edge cuts. It is proved that the game domination number of a connected graph can be bounded above in terms of the size of minimal edge cuts. In particular,…

In the early 1950s Lloyd Shapley proposed an ordinal and set-valued solution concept for zero-sum games called \emph{weak saddle}. We show that all weak saddles of a given zero-sum game are interchangeable and equivalent. As a consequence,…

A set $G$ of points on a 1.5-dimensional terrain, also known as an $x$-monotone polygonal chain, is said to guard the terrain if any point on the terrain is 'seen' by a point in $G$. Two points on the terrain see each other if and only if…

We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…

A checkers-like model game with a simplified set of rules is studied through extensive simulations of agents with different expertise and strategies. The introduction of complementary strategies, in a quite general way, provides a tool to…