Related papers: The Parameterized Complexity of Positional Games
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…
Coalition formation is a key topic in multi-agent systems. Coalitions enable agents to achieve goals that they may not have been able to achieve on their own. Previous work has shown problems in coalitional games to be computationally hard.…
In this paper we study the problem of finding a small safe set $S$ in a graph $G$, i.e. a non-empty set of vertices such that no connected component of $G[S]$ is adjacent to a larger component in $G - S$. We enhance our understanding of the…
When solving k-in-a-Row games, the Hales-Jewett pairing strategy [4] is a well-known strategy to prove that specific positions are (at most) a draw. It requires two empty squares per possible winning line (group) to be marked, i.e., with a…
Given a directed graph $D$ on $n$ vertices and a positive integer $k$, the Arc-Disjoint Cycle Packing problem is to determine whether $D$ has $k$ arc-disjoint cycles. This problem is known to be W[1]-hard in general directed graphs. In this…
We address two bottlenecks for concise QBF encodings of maker-breaker positional games, like Hex and Tic-Tac-Toe. Our baseline is a QBF encoding with explicit variables for board positions and an explicit representation of winning…
A vertex set $S$ of a graph $G$ is geodetic if every vertex of $G$ lies on a shortest path between two vertices in $S$. Given a graph $G$ and $k \in \mathbb N$, the NP-hard Geodetic Set problem asks whether there is a geodetic set of size…
Maker-Breaker total domination game in graphs is introduced as a natural counterpart to the Maker-Breaker domination game recently studied by Duch\^ene, Gledel, Parreau, and Renault. Both games are instances of the combinatorial…
In many multiagent environments, a designer has some, but limited control over the game being played. In this paper, we formalize this by considering incompletely specified games, in which some entries of the payoff matrices can be chosen…
We study a game where two players take turns selecting points of a convex geometry until the convex closure of the jointly selected points contains all the points of a given winning set. The winner of the game is the last player able to…
The preferences of players in non-cooperative games represent their choice in the set of available options, which meet the completeness property if players are able to compare any pair of available options. In the existing literature, the…
Classical objectives in two-player zero-sum games played on graphs often deal with limit behaviors of infinite plays: e.g., mean-payoff and total-payoff in the quantitative setting, or parity in the qualitative one (a canonical way to…
Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…
We study biased Maker-Breaker games on a graph system $\{G_1,\ldots,G_s\}$, in which Maker's goal is to claim certain rainbow structures, i.e., specified subgraphs consisting of at most one edge from each graph $G_i$. We consider the…
Ordered matchings, defined as graphs with linearly ordered vertices, where each vertex is connected to exactly one edge, play a crucial role in the area of ordered graphs and their homomorphisms. Therefore, we consider related problems from…
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
Negatively answering a question posed by Mnich and Wiese (Math. Program. 154(1-2):533-562), we show that P2|prec,$p_j{\in}\{1,2\}$|$C_{\max}$, the problem of finding a non-preemptive minimum-makespan schedule for precedence-constrained jobs…
Graph games provide the foundation for modeling and synthesizing reactive processes. In the synthesis of stochastic reactive processes, the traditional model is perfect-information stochastic games, where some transitions of the game graph…
Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) such that a game instance admits a winning…
A set S of vertices of a graph is a defensive alliance if, for each element of S, the majority of its neighbors is in S. The problem of finding a defensive alliance of minimum size in a given graph is NP-hard and there are polynomial-time…