Related papers: Zombie Dice: An Optimal Play Strategy
This paper studies two-player zero-sum games played on graphs and makes contributions toward the following question: given an objective, how much memory is required to play optimally for that objective? We study regular objectives, where…
We define a variant of the two-dimensional Silver Dollar game. Two coins are placed on a chessboard of unbounded size, and two players take turns choosing one of the coins and moving it. Coins are to be moved to the left or upward…
A query game is a pair of a set $Q$ of queries and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of functions, or codewords $f:Q\rightarrow \mathbb{Z}.$ We think of this as a two-player game. One player, Codemaker, picks a hidden codeword $f\in \mathcal{F}$. The…
N players are randomly fitted with a colored hat (q different colors). All players guess simultaneously the color of their own hat observing only the hat colors of the other N-1 players. The team wins if all players guess right. No…
We compare two kinds of pursuit-evasion games played on graphs. In Cops and Robbers, the cops can move strategically to adjacent vertices as they please, while in a new variant, called deterministic Zombies and Survivors, the zombies (the…
A variation on Janowski's cubeful equity model is proposed for cube handling in backgammon money games. Instead of approximating the cubeful take point as an interpolation between the dead and live cube limits, a new model is developed…
In the game of Scrabble, letter tiles are drawn uniformly at random from a bag. The variability of possible draws as the game progresses is a source of variation that makes it more likely for an inferior player to win a head-to-head match…
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 define a two-player combinatorial game in which players take alternate turns; each turn consists on deleting a vertex of a graph, together with all the edges containing such vertex. If any vertex became isolated by a player's move then…
Major advances in Question Answering technology were needed for IBM Watson to play Jeopardy! at championship level -- the show requires rapid-fire answers to challenging natural language questions, broad general knowledge, high precision,…
We study a sequential coin-flipping game in which a player starts with~$n$ coins, each landing heads independently with probability~$p$. In each round the player flips all remaining coins and must set aside at least one coin showing heads;…
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.…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the well known tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) board game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields", each of them being a tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player…
The_Robin_Hood_ game is played as follows: On day i, the Sheriff puts s(i) bags of gold in the cave. On night i, Robin removes r(i) bags from the cave. The game is played for each natural nymber i. Robin wins if each bag which was put in…
We introduce a graph Ramsey game called Ramsey, Paper, Scissors. This game has two players, Proposer and Decider. Starting from an empty graph on $n$ vertices, on each turn Proposer proposes a potential edge and Decider simultaneously…
This paper examines two different variants of the Ludo game, involving multiple dice and a fixed number of total turns. Within each variant, multiple game lengths (total no. of turns) are considered. To compare the two variants, a set of…
We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can…
We introduce the game INFLUENCE, a scoring combinatorial game, played on a directed graph where each vertex is either colored black or white. The two players, Black and White play alternately by taking a vertex of their color and all its…
This paper investigates mixed strategies in dynamic games with perfect information. We present an example to show that a player may obtain higher payoff by playing mixed strategy. By contrast, the main result of the paper shows that every…
Two-player games on graphs provide the theoretical frame- work for many important problems such as reactive synthesis. While the traditional study of two-player zero-sum games has been extended to multi-player games with several notions of…