Related papers: Solitaire Chess is NP-complete

We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…

A 5x5 board is the smallest board on which one can set up all kind of chess pieces as a start position. We consider Gardner's minichess variant in which all pieces are set as in a standard chessboard (from Rook to King). This game has…

We propose a neural network-based approach to calculate the value of a chess square-piece combination. Our model takes a triplet (Color, Piece, Square) as an input and calculates a value that measures the advantage/disadvantage of having…

We deal with the generalized Nash game proposed by Rosen, which is a game with strategy sets that are coupled across players through a shared constraint. A reduction to a classical game is shown, and as a consequence, Rosen's result can be…

We analyze misere play of impartial tic-tac-toe---a game suggested by Bob Koca in which both players make X's on the board, and the first player to complete three-in-a-row loses. This game was recently discussed on mathoverflow.net in a…

We study the computational complexity of distance games, a class of combinatorial games played on graphs. A move consists of colouring an uncoloured vertex subject to it not being at certain distances determined by two sets, D and S. D is…

We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 2D, improving an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99]. The puzzle, inspired by the game *PushPush*, consists of unit square blocks on an integer…

We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 3D. The puzzle, inspired by the game PushPush, consists of unit square blocks on an integer lattice. An agent may push blocks (but never pull them) in attempting to move…

Solitaire {\sc Flood-it}, or {\sc Honey-Bee}, is a game played on a colored graph. The player resides in a source vertex. Originally his territory is the maximal connected, monochromatic subgraph that contains the source. A move consists of…

Strong placement games (SP-games) are a class of combinatorial games whose structure allows one to describe the game via simplicial complexes. A natural question is whether well-known invariants of combinatorial games, such as "game value",…

Concavity and its refinements underpin tractability in multiplayer games, where players independently choose actions to maximize their own payoffs which depend on other players' actions. In concave games, where players' strategy sets are…

We study the problem of computing an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium in repeated games. Earlier work by Borgs et al. [2010] suggests that this problem is intractable. We show that if we make a slight change to their model---modeling the players…

We investigate complexity issues related to pure Nash equilibria of strategic games. We show that, even in very restrictive settings, determining whether a game has a pure Nash Equilibrium is NP-hard, while deciding whether a game has a…

This paper presents iNNK, a multiplayer drawing game where human players team up against an NN. The players need to successfully communicate a secret code word to each other through drawings, without being deciphered by the NN. With this…

Mastermind is in essence a search problem in which a string of symbols that is kept secret must be found by sequentially playing strings that use the same alphabet, and using the responses that indicate how close are those other strings to…

Holzer and Holzer (Discrete Applied Mathematics 144(3):345--358, 2004) proved that the Tantrix(TM) rotation puzzle problem is NP-complete. They also showed that for infinite rotation puzzles, this problem becomes undecidable. We study the…

We study the puzzle graphs of hexagonal sliding puzzles of various shapes and with various numbers of holes. The puzzle graph is a combinatorial model which captures the solvability and the complexity of sequential mechanical puzzles.…

Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…

In his celebrated book "On Number and Games" (Academic Press, New-York, 1976), J.H. Conway introduced twelve versions of compound games. We analyze these twelve versions for the Node-Kayles game on paths. For usual disjunctive compound,…

Some old peg solitaire boards are brought down from the literature, dusted off, and re-examined, and some remarkable problems are displayed on them.