Related papers: Keeping Your Distance is Hard
Hackenbush is a two player game, played on a graph with coloured edges where players take it in turns to remove edges of their own colour. It has been shown that under normal play rules Red-Blue Hackenbush (all edges are coloured either red…
Given an increasing graph property $\cal F$, the strong Avoider-Avoider $\cal F$ game is played on the edge set of a complete graph. Two players, Red and Blue, take turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges with Red going first, and the…
We define a new impartial combinatorial game, Flag Coloring, based on flood filling. We then generalize to a graph game, and find values for many positions on two colors. We demonstrate that the generalized game is PSPACE-complete for two…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner of the game. Such games are central in formal methods since they model the interaction between a…
The undirected edge geography is a two-player combinatorial game on an undirected rooted graph. The players alternatively perform a move consisting of choosing an edge incident to the root vertex, removing the chosen edge, and marking the…
In the Maker-Breaker vertex colouring game, first publicised by Gardner in 1981, Maker and Breaker alternately colour vertices of a graph using a fixed palette, maintaining a proper colouring at all times. Maker aims to colour the whole…
Graph Exploration problems ask a searcher to explore an unknown environment. The environment is modeled as a graph, where the searcher needs to visit each vertex beginning at some vertex. Treasure Hunt problems are a variation of Graph…
The move-minimizing puzzles presented here are certain types of one-player combinatorial games that are shown to have explicit solutions whenever they can be encoded in a certain way as diamond-colored modular or distributive lattices. Our…
Let D be a finite set of positive real numbers. The distance graph G(R,D) is the graph with vertex set R (set of real numbers), and two vertices x, y are adjacent if |x-y| belongs to D. We prove that every positive integer t>1 there is a…
The paper considers the NP-hard graph vertex coloring problem, which differs from traditional problems in which it is required to color vertices with a given (or minimal) number of colors so that adjacent vertices have different colors. In…
A vertex coloring of a graph $G$ is called a 2-distance coloring if any two vertices at a distance at most $2$ from each other receive different colors. Suppose that $G$ is a planar graph with girth $5$ and maximum degree $\Delta$. We prove…
Muller games are played by two players moving a token along a graph; the winner is determined by the set of vertices that occur infinitely often. The central algorithmic problem is to compute the winning regions for the players. Different…
In this thesis, we survey techniques and results from the study of Complexity Theory and Games. We then apply these techniques to obtain new results for previously unstudied games. Our contributions in the games Hexiom, Cut the Rope, and…
In this article we consider a problem related to two famous combinatorial topics. One of them concerns the chromatic number of the space. The other deals with graphs having big girth (the length of the shortest cycle) and large chromatic…
We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…
This paper provides a complexity analysis for the game of reconnaissance blind chess (RBC), a recently-introduced variant of chess where each player does not know the positions of the opponent's pieces a priori but may reveal a subset of…
We investigate a cops and robber game on directed graphs, where the robber moves along the arcs of the graph, while the cops can select any position at each time step. Our main focus is on the cop number: the minimum number of cops required…
The localization game is a two player combinatorial game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The cops choose a set of vertices $S_1 \subseteq V$ with $|S_1|=k$. The robber then chooses a vertex $v \in V$ whose location is hidden from the cops, but…
Infinite games where several players seek to coordinate under imperfect information are deemed to be undecidable, unless the information is hierarchically ordered among the players. We identify a class of games for which joint winning…
We study the complexity of solving two-player infinite duration games played on a fixed finite graph, where the control of a node is not predetermined but rather assigned randomly. In classic random-turn games, control of each node is…