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In 1901, Bouton proved that a winning strategy of the game of Nim is given by the bitwise XOR, called the nim-sum. But, why does such a weird binary operation work? Led by this question, this paper introduces a categorical reinterpretation…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Ryuya Hora

Stochastic games combine controllable and adversarial non-determinism with stochastic behavior and are a common tool in control, verification and synthesis of reactive systems facing uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic games are natural…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Tobias Winkler , Maximilian Weininger

Concavity and its refinements underpin tractability in multiplayer games, where players independently choose actions to maximize their own payoffs which depend on other players' actions. In concave games, where players' strategy sets are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Vincent Leon , Iosif Sakos , Ryann Sim , Antonios Varvitsiotis

Stochastic games combine controllable and adversarial non-determinism with stochastic behavior and are a common tool in control, verification and synthesis of reactive systems facing uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic games are natural…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Tobias Winkler , Maximilian Weininger

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

This thesis will be discussing scoring play combinatorial games and looking at the general structure of these games under different operators. I will also be looking at the Sprague-Grundy values for scoring play impartial games, and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-02-22 Fraser Stewart

Stochastic games are an important class of problems that generalize Markov decision processes to game theoretic scenarios. We consider finite state two-player zero-sum stochastic games over an infinite time horizon with discounted rewards.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2008-06-17 Parikshit Shah , Pablo A. Parrilo

We consider a setting in which a principal gets to choose which game from some given set is played by a group of agents. The principal would like to choose a game that favors one of the players, the social preferences of the players, or the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Caspar Oesterheld , Vincent Conitzer

Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-02-11 Melissa A. Huggan , Richard J. Nowakowski

Number games play a central role in alternating normal play combinatorial game theory due to their real-number-like properties (Conway 1976). Here we undertake a critical re-examination: we begin with integer and dyadic games and identify…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Prem Kant , Urban Larsson

Subtraction games are a class of impartial combinatorial games whose positions correspond to nonnegative integers and whose moves correspond to subtracting one of a fixed set of numbers from the current position. Though they are easy to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-07-11 Nathan Fox

Deep learning is built on the foundational guarantee that gradient descent on an objective function converges to local minima. Unfortunately, this guarantee fails in settings, such as generative adversarial nets, that exhibit multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-14 Alistair Letcher , David Balduzzi , Sebastien Racaniere , James Martens , Jakob Foerster , Karl Tuyls , Thore Graepel

This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Jiawei Ge , Yuanhao Wang , Wenzhe Li , Chi Jin

A class of discrete Bidding Combinatorial Games that generalize alternating normal play was introduced by Kant, Larsson, Rai, and Upasany (2022). The major questions concerning optimal outcomes were resolved. By generalizing standard game…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Prem Kant , Urban Larsson , Ravi K. Rai , Akshay V. Upasany

The concept of nimbers--a.k.a. Grundy-values or nim-values--is fundamental to combinatorial game theory. Nimbers provide a complete characterization of strategic interactions among impartial games in their disjunctive sums as well as the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Kyle Burke , Matthew Ferland , Shanghua Teng

Regular games form a well-established class of games for analysis and synthesis of reactive systems. They include coloured Muller games, McNaughton games, Muller games, Rabin games, and Streett games. These games are played on directed…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Zihui Liang , Bakh Khoussainov , Mingyu Xiao

A Subtraction-Division game is a two player combinatorial game with three parameters: a set S, a set D, and a number n. The game starts at n, and is a race to say the number 1. Each player, on their turn, can either move the total to n-s…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-06-05 Elizabeth Kupin

In order to obtain the best-known guarantees, algorithms are traditionally tailored to the particular problem we want to solve. Two recent developments, the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC) and the Sum-of-Squares (SOS) method, surprisingly…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-28 Boaz Barak , David Steurer

The cornerstone underpinning deep learning is the guarantee that gradient descent on an objective converges to local minima. Unfortunately, this guarantee fails in settings, such as generative adversarial nets, where there are multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 David Balduzzi , Sebastien Racaniere , James Martens , Jakob Foerster , Karl Tuyls , Thore Graepel

We study the computational complexity of finding stable outcomes in hedonic games, which are a class of coalition formation games. We restrict our attention to symmetric additively-separable hedonic games, which are a nontrivial subclass of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-18 Martin Gairing , Rahul Savani