Related papers: Chess God's number grows exponentially

Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity. It has served to study human behavior from the perspective of a wide number of disciplines, from cognitive skills such as memory and learning, to…

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…

In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…

The classic Rock-Paper-Scissors game of size 3 and its extension, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, are modeled by directed graphs called tournaments. They can be further extended to any odd size. The extended games are regular tournaments…

Let $(X_n)_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$ be a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with distribution $\mathbb P(X_1=1)=\mathbb P(X_1=-1)=1/2$. Let $F(\sigma)=\sum_{n=1}^\infty X_nn^{-\sigma}$. We prove that the following holds almost surely…

If the edges of the complete graph $K_n$ are totally ordered, a simple path whose edges are in ascending order is called increasing. The worst-case length of the longest increasing path has remained an open problem for several decades, with…

We study variants of regular infinite games where the strict alternation of moves between the two players is subject to modifications. The second player may postpone a move for a finite number of steps, or, in other words, exploit in his…

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…

Every positive integer may be written uniquely as a base-$\beta$ decomposition--that is a legal sum of powers of $\beta$--where $\beta$ is the dominating root of a non-increasing positive linear recurrence sequence. Guided by earlier work…

Let $\gamma_g(G)$ be the game domination number of a graph $G$. It is proved that if ${\rm diam}(G) = 2$, then $\gamma_g(G) \le \left\lceil \frac{n(G)}{2} \right\rceil- \left\lfloor \frac{n(G)}{11}\right\rfloor$. The bound is attained: if…

We prove an interesting fact about Lottery: the winning 6 numbers (out of 49) in the game of the Lottery contain two consecutive numbers with a surprisingly high probability (almost 50%).

We introduce a new and natural stationary set preserving forcing $\mathbb P^{c-c}({\lambda},{\mu})$ that (under $\mathsf{NS}_{\omega_1}$ precipitous + existence of $H_{\theta}^#$ for a sufficiently large regular ${\theta}$) increases the…

We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…

A permutation is (1-23-4)-avoiding if it contains no four entries, increasing left to right, with the middle two adjacent in the permutation. Here we give a 2-variable recurrence for the number of such permutations, improving on the…

We analyze what happens to the average duration of a game of Chutes and Ladders as the probability of rolling $\delta \in \{ 1,2,3,4,5,6\}$ approaches 100%. We utilize Markov models, and Monte Carlo simulations in Python. We also introduce…

We develop a theory of combinatorial games that is appropriate for describing positions in Hex and other monotone set coloring games. We consider two natural conditions on such games: a game is monotone if all moves available to both…

Heap's Law states that in a large enough text corpus, the number of types as a function of tokens grows as $N=KM^\beta$ for some free parameters $K,\beta$. Much has been written about how this result and various generalizations can be…

Let $\alpha_1, \cdots, \alpha_d$ be real numbers, and let $S$ be the set of integers $s$ so that $||\alpha_i s||_{\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}}>\delta$ for some $i$ and some fixed $\delta>0$. We prove $S$ is not \enquote{$2$-large}, i.e. there is…

Cheating in chess, by using advice from powerful software, has become a major problem, reaching the highest levels. As opposed to the large majority of previous work, which concerned {\em detection} of cheating, here we try to evaluate the…

In 1983 the chess periodical EG published a summary of a letter from Julius Telesin outlining how a king, a bishop and a knight can checkmate a lonely king on an arbitrarily large chessboard. The Telesin checkmating procedure doesn't seem…