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We extend the open games framework for compositional game theory to encompass also mixed strategies, making essential use of the discrete probability distribution monad. We show that the resulting games form a symmetric monoidal category,…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
The $\mathscr{P}$-position sets of some combinatorial games have special combinatorial structures. For example, the $\mathscr{P}$-position set of the hexad game, first investigated by Conway and Ryba, is the block set of the Steiner system…
Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different sports. Using a comprehensive data set of…
Parrondo's paradox refers to the counter-intuitive situation where a winning strategy results from a suitable combination of losing ones. Simple stochastic games exhibiting this paradox have been introduced around the turn of the…
A checkers-like model game with a simplified set of rules is studied through extensive simulations of agents with different expertise and strategies. The introduction of complementary strategies, in a quite general way, provides a tool to…
When a game involves many agents or when communication between agents is not possible, it is useful to resort to distributed learning where each agent acts in complete autonomy without any information on the other agents' situations.…
The Parrondo effect describes the seemingly paradoxical situation in which two losing games can, when combined, become winning [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 24 (2000)]. Here we generalize this analysis to the case where both games are…
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The disjunctive sum $G + H$ of games $G$ and $H$ is the game in which $G$ and $H$ are played in parallel, and a player makes a move on exactly one of…
We introduce the category of optiongraphs and option-preserving maps as a model to study impartial combinatorial games. Outcomes, remoteness, and extended nim-values are preserved under option-preserving maps. We show that the four…
Evolutionary games on graphs play an important role in the study of evolution of cooperation in applied biology. Using rigorous mathematical concepts from a dynamical systems and graph theoretical point of view, we formalize the notions of…
We propose a simple method for combining together voting rules that performs a run-off between the different winners of each voting rule. We prove that this combinator has several good properties. For instance, even if just one of the base…
Consider equipping an alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ with a group action that partitions the set of words into equivalence classes which we call patterns. We answer standard questions for the Penney's game on patterns and show non-transitivity for…
In this note, we prove the existence of an equilibrium concept, dubbed conditional strategy equilibrium, for non-cooperative games in which a strategy of a player is a function from the other players' actions to her own actions. We study…
Snort is a two-player game played on a simple graph in which players alternately colour a vertex such that they do not colour adjacent to their opponents' vertex. In combinatorial game theory, the temperature of a position is a measure of…
We give a series of combinatorial results that can be obtained from any two collections (both indexed by $\Z\times \N$) of left and right pointing arrows that satisfy some natural relationship. When applied to certain self-interacting…
Economic ensembles can be modeled as networks of interacting agents whose be-haviors are described in terms of game theory. The evolutionary paradigm has been applied to two-person games to discover strategies in this context.…
We study nondeterministic strategies in parity games with the aim of computing a most permissive winning strategy. Following earlier work, we measure permissiveness in terms of the average number/weight of transitions blocked by the…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
We develop methods to formally describe and compare games, in order to probe questions of game structure and design, and as a stepping stone to predicting player behavior from design patterns. We define a grammar-like formalism to describe…