Related papers: A New Twist on Wythoff's Game
Moves in chess games are usually analyzed on a case-by-case basis by professional players, but thanks to the availability of large game databases, we can envision another approach of the game. Here, we indeed adopt a very different point of…
We consider the $n\times n$ game of Phutball. It is shown that, given an arbitrary position of stones on the board, it is a PSPACE-hard problem to determine whether the specified player can win the game, regardless of the opponent's choices…
Berlekamp proposed a class of impartial combinatorial games based on the moves of chess pieces on rectangular boards. We generalize impartial chess games by playing them on Young diagrams and obtain results about winning and losing…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
In many combinatorial games, one can prove that the first player wins under best play using a simple but non-constructive argument called strategy-stealing. This work is about the complexity behind these proofs: how hard is it to actually…
Subtraction games have a rich literature as normal-play combinatorial games (e.g., Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy, 1982). Recently, the theory has been extended to zero-sum scoring play (Cohensius et al. 2019). Here, we take the approach of…
Two-player graph games are a fundamental model for reasoning about the interaction of agents. These games are played between two players who move a token along a graph. In bidding games, the players have some monetary budget, and at each…
We study a two-player game played on undirected graphs called {\sc Trail Trap}, which is a variant of a game known as {\sc Partizan Edge Geography}. One player starts by choosing any edge and moving a token from one endpoint to the other;…
A large class of Positional Games are defined on the complete graph on $n$ vertices. The players, Maker and Breaker, take the edges of the graph in turns, and Maker wins iff his subgraph has a given -- usually monotone -- property. Here we…
We consider Subtraction Nim, where two players have exactly the same options, but which is partizan in the sense that at the game ending, a partizan rule is applied for the decision of the winner. We consider the following example: Let $S$…
We present and analyze PackIt!, a turn-based game consisting of packing rectangles on an $n \times n$ grid. PackIt! can be easily played on paper, either as a competitive two-player game or in \emph{solitaire} fashion. On the $t$-th turn, a…
Optimization under uncertainty is a fundamental problem in learning and decision-making, particularly in multi-agent systems. Previously, Feldman, Kalai, and Tennenholtz [2010] demonstrated the ability to efficiently compete in repeated…
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,…
The following game was introduced in a list of open problems from 1983 attributed to Erd\H{o}s: two players take turns claiming edges of a $K_n$ until all edges are exhausted. Player 1 wins the game if the largest clique that they claim at…
We investigate a two player game called the $K^4$-building game: two players alternately claim edges of an infinite complete graph. Each player's aim is to claim all six edges on some vertex set of size four for themself. The first player…
We study an evolutionary game of chance in which the probabilities for different outcomes (e.g., heads or tails) depend on the amount wagered on those outcomes. The game is perhaps the simplest possible probabilistic game in which…
Schmidt's game, and other similar intersection games have played an important role in recent years in applications to number theory, dynamics, and Diophantine approximation theory. These games are real games, that is, games in which the…
Hirschfeldt and Jockusch (2016) introduced a two-player game in which winning strategies for one or the other player precisely correspond to implications and non-implications between $\Pi^1_2$ principles over $\omega$-models of…
We develop an abstract axiomatic theory of tie-breaking. A tie-breaking input consists of a finite set N of players, a weak order on N representing the standings to be refined, and an auxiliary information item drawn from a set on which the…
We consider three variants of a partisan combinatorial game between two players, Left and Right, played on an undirected simple graph. Left is able to delete vertices (and incident edges) while Right is able to delete edges. This natural…