Related papers: Keeping Your Distance is Hard
Distance games are games played on graphs in which the players alternately colour vertices, and which vertices can be coloured only depends on the distance to previously coloured vertices. The polynomial profile encodes the number of…
Arc-Kayles is a game where two players alternate removing two adjacent vertices until no move is left, the winner being the player who played the last move. Introduced in 1978, its computational complexity is still open. More recently,…
Generalized Geography is a combinatorial game played on a directed graph. Players take turns moving a token from vertex to vertex, deleting a vertex after moving the token away from it. A player unable to move loses. It is well known that…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value…
In this paper, we introduce a graph coloring game called the Edge-Distinguishing Game (EDGe). The edge-distinguishing chromatic number of a graph is used to determine the moves each player can make. We determine which player has a winning…
The game domination number is a graph invariant that arises from a game, which is related to graph domination in a similar way as the game chromatic number is related to graph coloring. In this paper we show that verifying whether the game…
Avoidance games are games in which two players claim vertices of a hypergraph and try to avoid some structures. These games are studied since the introduction of the game of SIM in 1968, but only few complexity results are known on them. In…
We study algorithmic complexity of solving subtraction games in a~fixed dimension with a finite difference set. We prove that there exists a game in this class such that any algorithm solving the game runs in exponential time. Also we prove…
Coloring games are combinatorial games where the players alternate painting uncolored vertices of a graph one of $k > 0$ colors. Each different ruleset specifies that game's coloring constraints. This paper investigates six impartial…
We consider combinatorial avoidance and achievement games based on graph Ramsey theory: The players take turns in coloring still uncolored edges of a graph G, each player being assigned a distinct color, choosing one edge per move. In…
Given a graph $G$, a set $S$ of vertices in $G$ is a general position set if no triple of vertices from $S$ lie on a common shortest path in $G$. The general position achievement/avoidance game is played on a graph $G$ by players A and B…
One of the most important combinatorial optimization problems is graph coloring. There are several variations of this problem involving additional constraints either on vertices or edges. They constitute models for real applications, such…
In this work, the classical Nelson -- Hadwiger problem is studied which lies on the edge of combinatorial geometry and graph theory. It concerns colorings of distance graphs in $ {\mathbb R}^n $, i.e., graphs such that their vertices are…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
We study hedonic coalition formation games in which cooperation among the players is restricted by a graph structure: a subset of players can form a coalition if and only if they are connected in the given graph. We investigate the…
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…
A poset game is a two-player game played over a partially ordered set (poset) in which the players alternate choosing an element of the poset, removing it and all elements greater than it. The first player unable to select an element of the…
This paper introduced a pursuit and evasion game to be played on a connected graph. One player moves invisibly around the graph, and the other player must guess his position. At each time step the second player guesses a vertex, winning if…
Consider the following one-player game played on an initially empty graph with $n$ vertices. At each stage a randomly selected new edge is added and the player must immediately color the edge with one of $r$ available colors. Her objective…