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Consider concurrent, infinite duration, two-player win/lose games played on graphs. If the winning condition satisfies some simple requirement, the existence of Player 1 winning (finite-memory) strategies is equivalent to the existence of…
This survey aims at demonstrating that the structure of precedence constraints plays a tremendous role on the complexity of scheduling problems. Indeed many problems can be NP-hard when considering general precedence constraints, while they…
Modern board games are a rich source of interesting and new challenges for combinatorial problems. The game Nmbr9 is a solitaire style puzzle game using polyominoes. The rules of the game are simple to explain, but modelling the game…
This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…
For a positive integer $k$, a $k$-colouring of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a mapping $c: V\rightarrow\{1,2,...,k\}$ such that $c(u)\neq c(v)$ whenever $uv\in E$. The Colouring problem is to decide, for a given $G$ and $k$, whether a $k$-colouring…
In a graph G, a k-attack A is any set of at most k vertices and l-defense D is a set of at most l vertices. We say that defense D counters attack A if each a in A can be matched to a distinct defender d in D with a equal to d or a adjacent…
In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial…
We consider approximating the minmax value of a multi-player game in strategic form. Tightening recent bounds by Borgs et al., we observe that approximating the value with a precision of epsilon log n digits (for any constant epsilon>0 is…
We establish that the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) threshold problem for mean-payoff games is NP-complete. While the SPE threshold problem was recently shown to be decidable (in doubly exponential time) and NP-hard, its exact worst…
Infinite games where several players seek to coordinate under imperfect information are deemed to be undecidable, unless the information is hierarchically ordered among the players. We identify a class of games for which joint winning…
Many natural optimization problems derived from $\sf NP$ admit bilevel and multilevel extensions in which decisions are made sequentially by multiple players with conflicting objectives, as in interdiction, adversarial selection, and…
A $k$-coloring of a tournament is a partition of its vertices into $k$ acyclic sets. Deciding if a tournament is 2-colorable is NP-hard. A natural problem, akin to that of coloring a 3-colorable graph with few colors, is to color a…
In the MINIMUM CONVEX COVER (MCC) problem, we are given a simple polygon $\mathcal P$ and an integer $k$, and the question is if there exist $k$ convex polygons whose union is $\mathcal P$. It is known that MCC is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard…
In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…
We present a PSPACE algorithm that decides satisfiability of the graded modal logic Gr(K_R)---a natural extension of propositional modal logic K_R by counting expressions---which plays an important role in the area of knowledge…
We consider the operation of sum on Kripke frames, where a family of frames-summands is indexed by elements of another frame. In many cases, the modal logic of sums inherits the finite model property and decidability from the modal logic of…
Bloxorz is an online puzzle game where players move a 1 by 1 by 2 block by tilting it on a subset of the two dimensional grid. Bloxorz features switches that open and close trapdoors. The puzzle is to move the block from its initial…
The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) involves deciding, given a set of variables and a set of constraints on the variables, whether or not there is an assignment to the variables satisfying all of the constraints. One formulation of…
We study the problem of transforming one list (vertex) coloring of a graph into another list coloring by changing only one vertex color assignment at a time, while at all times maintaining a list coloring, given a list of allowed colors for…
Poker is one of the most popular card games, whose rational investigation represents also one of the major challenges in several scientific areas, spanning from information theory and artificial intelligence to game theory and statistical…