Related papers: Rook Endgame Problems in $m$ by $n$ Chess

Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers; a similar result, though with a different notion of a legal decomposition, holds for many other sequences. We use these…

In the past three decades, deductive games have become interesting from the algorithmic point of view. Deductive games are two players zero sum games of imperfect information. The first player, called "codemaker", chooses a secret code and…

We examine a two-person game we call Will-Testing in which the strategy space for both players is a real number. It has no equilibrium. When an infinitely large set of players plays this in all possible pairings, there is an equilibrium for…

Given a tree $T=(V,E)$ on $n$ vertices, we consider the $(1 : q)$ Maker-Breaker tree embedding game ${\mathcal T}_n$. The board of this game is the edge set of the complete graph on $n$ vertices. Maker wins ${\mathcal T}_n$ if and only if…

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.…

Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…

Let $b_{n,k}$ denote the number of hooks of length $k$ in all the $t$-regular partitions of $n$. Singh and Barman raised the question of finding the relation between $b_{t,2}(n)$ and $b_{t,1}(n)$. Kim showed that there exists $N$ such that…

Infinite games (in the form of Gale-Stewart games) are studied where a play is a sequence of natural numbers chosen by two players in alternation, the winning condition being a subset of the Baire space $\omega^\omega$. We consider such…

Markov chains are an important example for a course on stochastic processes because simple board games can be used to illustrate the fundamental concepts. For example, a looping board game (like Monopoly) consists of all recurrent states,…

We analyze the general version of the classic guessing game Mastermind with $n$ positions and $k$ colors. Since the case $k \le n^{1-\varepsilon}$, $\varepsilon>0$ a constant, is well understood, we concentrate on larger numbers of colors.…

We prove an explicit upper bound on the amount of entanglement required by any strategy in a two-player cooperative game with classical questions and quantum answers. Specifically, we show that every strategy for a game with n-bit questions…

The restricted $(m,n;N)$-online Ramsey game is a game played between two players, Builder and Painter. The game starts with $N$ isolated vertices. Each turn Builder picks an edge to build and Painter chooses whether that edge is red or…

Let $n, r, k$ be positive integers such that $3\leq k < n$ and $2\leq r \leq k-1$. Let $m(n, r, k)$ denote the maximum number of edges an $r$-uniform hypergraph on $n$ vertices can have under the condition that any collection of $i$ edges,…

We consider a two player simultaneous-move game where the two players each select any permissible $n$-sided die for a fixed integer $n$. A player wins if the outcome of his roll is greater than that of his opponent. Remarkably, for $n>3$,…

We show that, in John Conway's board game Phutball (or Philosopher's Football), it is NP-complete to determine whether the current player has a move that immediately wins the game. In contrast, the similar problems of determining whether…

We study the generalization of the game Lights Out in which the standard square grid board is replaced by a graph. We examine the probability that, when a graph is chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices and $e$…

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:…

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…

We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…

Although mixed extensions of finite games always admit equilibria, this is not the case for countable games, the best-known example being Wald's pick-the-larger-integer game. Several authors have provided conditions for the existence of…