Related papers: Keeping Your Distance is Hard
We form a "map of tournaments" by adapting the map framework from the world of elections. By a tournament we mean a complete directed graph where the nodes are the players and an edge points from a winner of a game to the loser (with no…
We investigate the combinatorial game Slime Trail.This game is played on a graph with a starting piece in a node. Each player's objective is to reach one of their own goal nodes. Every turn the current player moves the piece and deletes the…
Snake is a classic computer game, which has been around for decades. Based on this game, we study the game of Snake on arbitrary undirected graphs. A snake forms a simple path that has to move to an apple while avoiding colliding with…
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…
The notion of forbidden-transition graphs allows for a robust generalization of walks in graphs. In a forbidden-transition graph, every pair of edges incident to a common vertex is permitted or forbidden; a walk is compatible if all pairs…
We define a two-player combinatorial game in which players take alternate turns; each turn consists on deleting a vertex of a graph, together with all the edges containing such vertex. If any vertex became isolated by a player's move then…
In quantum information, nonlocal games are particularly useful for differentiating classical, quantum, and non-signalling correlations. An example of differentiation is given by the principle of no-collapse of communication complexity,…
We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…
Temporal graphs extend ordinary graphs with discrete time that affects the availability of edges. We consider solving games played on temporal graphs where one player aims to explore the graph, i.e., visit all vertices. The complexity…
The Hanano Puzzle is a one-player game with irreversible gravity, where the goal is to make colored blocks make contact with flowers of the corresponding color. The game Jelly no Puzzle shares similar mechanics. In general, determining if a…
Zero forcing is an iterative graph coloring process whereby a colored vertex with a single uncolored neighbor forces that neighbor to be colored. It is NP-hard to find a minimum zero forcing set - a smallest set of initially colored…
We study routing games where every agent sequentially decides her next edge when she obtains the green light at each vertex. Because every edge only has capacity to let out one agent per round, an edge acts as a FIFO waiting queue that…
We say that a vertex-coloring of a graph is a proper k-distance domatic coloring if for each color, every vertex is within distance k from a vertex receiving that color. The maximum number of colors for which such a coloring exists is…
Parity games are games that are played on directed graphs whose vertices are labeled by natural numbers, called priorities. The players push a token along the edges of the digraph. The winner is determined by the parity of the greatest…
Motivated by understanding non-strict and strict pure strategy equilibria in network anti-coordination games, we define notions of stable and, respectively, strictly stable colorings in graphs. We characterize the cases when such colorings…
We introduce a topological combinatorial game called the Link Smoothing Game. The game is played on the shadow of a link diagram and legal moves consist of smoothing precrossings. One player's goal is to keep the diagram connected while the…
Graph coloring is a fundamental problem in combinatorics with many applications in practice. In this problem, the vertices in a given graph must be colored by using the least number of colors in such a way that a vertex has a different…
We analyze the computational complexity of two 2-player games involving packing objects into a box. In the first game, players alternate drawing polycubes from a shared pile and placing them into an initially empty box in any available…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We investigate the complexity of the platform video game Celeste. We prove that navigating Celeste is PSPACE-hard in five different ways, corresponding to different subsets of the game mechanics. In particular, we prove the game PSPACE-hard…