Related papers: Two-Player Tower of Hanoi
We propose and analyse a 2-parameter family of 2-player games on two heaps of tokens, and present a strategy based on a class of sequences. The strategy looks easy, but is actually hard. A class of exotic numeration systems is then used,…
A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…
Chocolate-bar games are variants of the CHOMP game. A three-dimensional chocolate bar comprises a set of cubic boxes sized 1 X 1 X 1, with a bitter cubic box at the bottom of the column at position (0,0). For non-negative integers u,w such…
We analyze a two-player game in which players take turns avoiding the selection of certain points within a convex geometry. The objective is to prevent the convex closure of all chosen points from encompassing a predefined set. The first…
We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…
There are $n$ independent Bernoulli random variables with parameters $p_i$ that are observed sequentially. Two players, A and B, act in turns starting with player A. Each player has the possibility on his turn, when $I_k=1$, to choose…
We study impartial take away games on 2 unordered piles of finite nonnegative numbers of tokens $(x,y)$. Two players alternate in removing at least one and at most all tokens from the respective piles, according to certain rules, and the…
The following problem is considered. Two players are each required to allocate a quota of~$n$ counters among~$k$ boxes labelled~$1,2,\ldots,k$. At times $t=1,2,3,\ldots$ a random box is identified; the probability of choosing box~$i$…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
This paper introduces a new quantum game called Quantum Tapsilou that is inspired by the classical traditional Greek coin tossing game tapsilou. The new quantum game, despite its increased complexity and scope, retains the most important…
Subtraction games are a classical topic in Combinatorial Game Theory. A result of Golomb~(1966) shows that every subtraction game with a finite move set has an eventually periodic nim-sequence, but the known proof yields only an exponential…
The Warden's Game is a 2-player game, played with a row of coins. One player (the prisoner) wants to get all coins to show tails; the other player (the warden) wants to delay that as long as possible. At each turn, one player transfers the…
In his list of open problems, Martin Erickson described a certain game: "Two players alternately put queens on an n x n chess board so that each new queen is not in range of any queen already on the board (the color of the queens is…
We study a very small three player poker game (one-third street Kuhn poker), and a simplified version of the game that is interesting because it has three distinct equilibrium solutions. For one-third street Kuhn poker, we are able to find…
Given $n$ piles of tokens and a positive integer $k \leq n$, we study the following two impartial combinatorial games Nim$^1_{n, \leq k}$ and Nim$^1_{n, =k}$. In the first (resp. second) game, a player, by one move, chooses at least $1$ and…
We study a variation of the combinatorial game of 2-pile Nim. Move as in 2-pile Nim but with the following constraint: Suppose the previous player has just removed say $x>0$ tokens from the shorter pile (either pile in case they have the…
We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…
We investigate a multi-player and multi-choice quantum game. We start from two-player and two-choice game and the result is better than its classical version. Then we extend it to N-player and N-choice cases. In the quantum domain, we…
We prove that elements of the Hanoi Towers groups $\mathcal{H}_m$ have depth bounded from above by a poly-logarithmic function $O(\log^{m-2} n)$, where $n$ is the length of an element. Therefore the word problem in groups $\mathcal{H}_m$ is…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…