Related papers: Rook Endgame Problems in $m$ by $n$ Chess
In the "Game about Squares" the task is to push unit squares on an integer lattice onto corresponding dots. A square can only be moved into one given direction. When a square is pushed onto a lattice point with an arrow the direction of the…
A recent paper by Bhatia, Chin, Mani, and Mossel (2026) defined stochastic processes aimed at modeling the game of War for {\em two players} with $n$ cards. That paper showed that these models, assuming uniform random decks, are equivalent…
Two-player graph games have found numerous applications, most notably in the synthesis of reactive systems from temporal specifications, but also in verification. The relevance of infinite-state systems in these areas has lead to…
Zeckendorf proved that every natural number $n$ can be expressed uniquely as a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers, called its Zeckendorf decomposition. Baird-Smith, Epstein, Flint, and Miller created the Zeckendorf game, a two-player…
The Tower of Hanoi game is a classical puzzle in recreational mathematics (Lucas 1883) which also has a strong record in pure mathematics. In a borderland between these two areas we find the characterization of the minimal number of moves,…
For a graph $L$ and an integer $k\geq 2$, $R_k(L)$ denotes the smallest integer $N$ for which for any edge-colouring of the complete graph $K_N$ by $k$ colours there exists a colour $i$ for which the corresponding colour class contains $L$…
The domination game is an optimization game played by two players, Dominator and Staller, who alternately select vertices in a graph $G$. A vertex is said to be dominated if it has been selected or is adjacent to a selected vertex. Each…
In the domination game studied here, Dominator and Staller alternately choose a vertex of a graph $G$ and take it into a set $D$. The number of vertices dominated by the set $D$ must increase in each single turn and the game ends when $D$…
The rules of Sudoku are often specified using twenty seven \texttt{all\_different} constraints, referred to as the {\em big} \mrules. Using graphical proofs and exploratory logic programming, the following main and new result is obtained:…
A formal n-square is the set of positions in an square matrix of size n. A shuffle of a formal n-square consists of independent rotations of each row and of each column. A key result turns out to be valid at least for n <= 34 and n = 37:…
Consider the following one-player game. Take a well-formed sequence of opening and closing brackets. As a move, the player can pair any opening bracket with any closing bracket to its right, erasing them. The goal is to re-pair (erase) the…
Consider the plane as a checkerboard, with each unit square colored black or white in an arbitrary manner. We show that for any such coloring there are straight line segments, of arbitrarily large length, such that the difference of their…
We present new results on Maker-Breaker games arising from the Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres problem in planar geometry. This classical problem asks how large a set in general position has to be to ensure the existence of $n$ points that are the…
We consider the Maker-Breaker positional game on the vertices of the $n$-dimensional hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$ with $k$-dimensional subcubes as winning sets. We describe a pairing strategy which allows Breaker to win if $n$ is a power of 4 and…
The Monotone Upper Bound Problem asks for the maximal number M(d,n) of vertices on a strictly-increasing edge-path on a simple d-polytope with n facets. More specifically, it asks whether the upper bound M(d,n)<=M_{ubt}(d,n) provided by…
We analyze the domination game, where two players, Dominator and Staller, construct together a dominating set M in a given graph, by alternately selecting vertices into M. Each move must increase the size of the dominated set. The players…
The $(m,b)$ Maker-Breaker percolation game on $(\mathbb{Z}^2)_p$, introduced by Day and Falgas-Ravry, is played in the following way. Before the game starts, each edge of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ is removed independently with probability $1-p$. After…
Endgame studies have long served as a tool for testing human creativity and intelligence. We find that they can serve as a tool for testing machine ability as well. Two of the leading chess engines, Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero (LCZero),…
The queen's graph $Q_{m \times n}$ has the squares of the $m \times n$ chessboard as its vertices; two squares are adjacent if they are in the same row, column, or diagonal of the board. A set $D$ of squares of $Q_{m \times n}$ is a…
We study two-player zero-sum games over infinite-state graphs with boundedness conditions. Our first contribution is about the strategy complexity, i.e the memory required for winning strategies: we prove that over general infinite-state…