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Related papers: Two-Player Tower of Hanoi

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We develop a unified algebraic theory of the weighted Tower of Hanoi with arbitrary nonnegative symmetric move costs depending on both disc index and pegs. Starting from a general optimality recurrence with two competing strategies -- one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-22 Andreas M. Hinz , El-Mehdi Mehiri

The game of nim, with its simple rules, its elegant solution and its historical importance is the quintessence of a combinatorial game, which is why it led to so many generalizations and modifications. We present a modification with a new…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-08-28 Eric Duchêne , Matthieu Dufour , Silvia Heubach , Urban Larsson

The Tower of Hanoi continues to provide a surprisingly rich meeting point for recursive reasoning, combinatorial geometry, and computational verification. Motivated by the editorial standards of the Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-12 Qi Junyi

In this paper, we perform a minimalistic quantization of the classical game of tic-tac-toe, by allowing superpositions of classical moves. In order for the quantum game to reduce properly to the classical game, we require legal quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-05-19 J. N. Leaw , S. A. Cheong

We introduce and study a new four-peg variant of the Tower of Hanoi problem under parity constraints. Two pegs are neutral and allow arbitrary disc placements, while the remaining two pegs are restricted to discs of a prescribed parity: one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-28 El-Mehdi Mehiri

We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-08-04 Tim Rammenstein

Wythoff's Game is a game for two players playing alternately on two stacks of tiles. On her turn, a player can either remove a positive number of tiles from one stack, or remove an equal positive number of tiles from both stacks. The last…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-06-23 Alex Meadows , Brad Putman

We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-09-05 Natalia Cardona-Tobón , Anja Sturm , Jan M. Swart

The classical Maker-Breaker positional game is played on a board which is a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, with two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately claiming vertices of $\mathcal{H}$ until all the vertices are claimed. When the game…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Guillaume Bagan , Quentin Deschamps , Florian Galliot , Mirjana Mikalački , Nacim Oijid

Yama Nim is a two heaps Nim game introduced in the second author's Master Thesis, where the player takes more than $2$ tokens from one heap, and return $1$ token to the other heap. Triangular Nim is a generalization, where the player takes…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-10-11 Shun-ichi Kimura , Takahiro Yamashita

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.…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Ivan Bortnovskyi , Michael Lucas , Steven J. Miller , Iana Vranesko , Ren Watson , Cameron White

We apply several quantization schemes to simple versions of the Chinos game. Classically, for two players with one coin each, there is a symmetric stable strategy that allows each player to win half of the times on average. A partial…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-11-07 F. Guinea , M. A. Martin-Delgado

We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-11 Ho-Hon Leung , Thotsaporn "Aek'' Thanatipanonda

We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Jeffrey Bosboom , Erik D. Demaine , Mikhail Rudoy

In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-29 John W. Cain , Ioannis M. Raymond , Nora C. Källersjö

We study variations of classical combinatorial games on two finite heaps of tokens, a.k.a. \emph{subtraction games}. Given non-negative integers $p_1,q_1, p_2,q_2$, where $p_1q_2 > q_1p_2$, $p_1>0$ and $q_2>0$, two players alternate in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-02-09 Urban Larsson

This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-17 Urban Larsson , Indrajit Saha , Makoto Yokoo

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…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2018-09-17 Paul Baird-Smith , Alyssa Epstein , Kristen Flint , Steven J. Miller

We present efficient algorithms for constructing a shortest path between two states in the Tower of Hanoi graph, and for computing the length of the shortest path. The key element is a finite-state machine which decides, after examining on…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Dan Romik

We derive a unified closed-form expression for the Frame-Stewart algorithm in the multi-peg Tower of Hanoi: M(p,n) = 2^(i(p,n)+1)*n - sum_{k=0}^{i(p,n)} 2^k * C(p+k-2, k), where i(p,n) = min{ j >= 0 : n <= C(p-1+j, j+1) }. and prove it…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-09 Abhiram Menon