Related papers: Two-Player Tower of Hanoi

We initiate the study of simple games from the point of view of combinatorial topology. The starting premise is that the losing coalitions of a simple game can be identified with a simplicial complex. Various topological constructions and…

We present in this paper four new variants of the Tower of Hanoi problem, the optimal solution of each of these variants is related to one of the four known numbers Fibonacci, Lucas, Pell, and Jacobsthal. We give an optimal solution to each…

A circular Nim game is a two player impartial combinatorial game consisting of n stacks of tokens placed in a circle. A move consists of choosing k consecutive stacks, and taking at least one token from one or more of the k stacks. The last…

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…

We consider random-turn positional games, introduced by Peres, Schramm, Sheffield and Wilson in 2007. A $p$-random-turn positional game is a two-player game, played the same as an ordinary positional game, except that instead of alternating…

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…

We prove an explicit upper bound on the amount of entanglement required by any strategy in a two-player cooperative game with classical questions and quantum answers. Specifically, we show that every strategy for a game with n-bit questions…

Two-player games on graphs are widely studied in formal methods as they model the interaction between a system and its environment. The game is played by moving a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite path. There are several…

The usual $n$-in-a-row game is a positional game in which two player alternately claim points in $\bb{Z}^2$ with the winner being the first player to claim $n$ consecutive points in a line. We consider a variant of the game, suggested by…

In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…

We introduce a two-player game in which one and his/her opponent attempt to pack as many ``prisoners'' as possible on the squares of an n-by-n checkerboard; each prisoner has to be ``protected'' by at least as many guards as the number of…

For the multi-peg Tower of Hanoi problem with $k \geqslant 4$ pegs, so far the best solution is obtained by the Stewart's algorithm based on the the following recurrence relation: $\mathrm{S}\_k(n)=\min\_{1 \leqslant t \leqslant n} \left\{2…

We show that the maximum success probability of players sharing quantum entanglement in a two-player game with classical questions of logarithmic length and classical answers of constant length is NP-hard to approximate to within constant…

The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…

Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers. We use this decomposition to construct a two-player game. Given a fixed integer $n$ and an initial decomposition of $n=n…

This paper investigates the popular card game UNO from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. We define simple and concise mathematical models for the game, including both cooperative and uncooperative versions, and analyze…

Two players play a game by alternately splitting a surface of a compact $2$-manifold along a simple closed curve that is not null-homotopic and attaching disks to the resulting boundary; the last player who can move wins. Starting from an…

Quantum entanglement is known to provide a strong advantage in many two-party distributed tasks. We investigate the question of how much entanglement is needed to reach optimal performance. For the first time we show that there exists a…

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the popular Tic-Tac-Toe game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields," with each field constituting its own miniature tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player must…

New combinatorial games are introduced, of which the most pertinent is Maharaja Nim. The rules extend those of the well-known impartial game of Wythoff Nim in which two players take turn in moving a single Queen of Chess on a large board,…