Related papers: Move-minimizing puzzles and diamond-colored modula…
Obliging games have been introduced in the context of the game perspective on reactive synthesis in order to enforce a degree of cooperation between the to-be-synthesized system and the environment. Previous approaches to the analysis of…
We investigate a new class of congestion games, called Totally Unimodular (TU) Congestion Games, where the players' strategies are binary vectors inside polyhedra defined by totally unimodular constraint matrices. Network congestion games…
Permutation sorting, one of the fundamental steps in pre-processing data for the efficient application of other algorithms, has a long history in mathematical research literature and has numerous applications. Two special-purpose sorting…
We show that a cooperative game may be decomposed into a sum of component games, one for each player, using the combinatorial Hodge decomposition on a graph. This decomposition is shown to satisfy certain efficiency, null-player, symmetry,…
The study of combinatorial games is intimately tied to the study of graphs, as any game can be realized as a directed graph in which players take turns traversing the edges until reaching a sink. However, there have heretofore been few…
Partial methods play an important role in formal methods and beyond. Recently such methods were developed for parity games, where polynomial-time partial solvers decide the winners of a subset of nodes. We investigate here how effective…
We consider the problem of determining the minimum number of moves needed to solve a certain one-dimensional peg puzzle. Let N be a positive integer. The puzzle apparatus consists of a block with a single row of 2N+1 equally spaced holes…
Value methods for solving stochastic games with partial observability model the uncertainty about states of the game as a probability distribution over possible states. The dimension of this belief space is the number of states. For many…
Our earlier work titled: "Win-move is Coordination-Free (Sometimes)" has shown that the classes of queries that can be distributedly computed in a coordination-free manner form a strict hierarchy depending on the assumptions of the model…
Bin Packing with Minimum Color Fragmentation (BPMCF) is an extension of the Bin Packing Problem in which each item has a size and a color and the goal is to minimize the sum of the number of bins containing items of each color. In this…
We propose that systems exhibiting compositional patterning at the nanoscale, so far assumed to be due to some kind of ordered phase segregation, can be understood instead in terms of coherent, single phase ordering of minority motifs,…
Recent successes of game-theoretic formulations in ML have caused a resurgence of research interest in differentiable games. Overwhelmingly, that research focuses on methods and upper bounds on their speed of convergence. In this work, we…
We survey recent results on combinatorial optimization problems in which the objective function is the entropy of a discrete distribution. These include the minimum entropy set cover, minimum entropy orientation, and minimum entropy…
There are many combinatorial games in which a move can terminate the game, such as a checkmate in chess. These moves give rise to diverse situations that fall outside the scope of the classical normal play structure. To analyze these games,…
Modulated symmetries are internal symmetries that are not invariant under spacetime symmetry actions. We propose a general way to describe the lattice translation modulated symmetries in 1+1D, including the non-invertible ones, via the…
Parity games are combinatorial representations of closed Boolean mu-terms. By adding to them draw positions, they have been organized by Arnold and one of the authors into a mu-calculus. As done by Berwanger et al. for the propositional…
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…
We examine a type of modified Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for strategising in combinatorial games. The modifications are derived by analysing simplified strategies and simplified versions of the underlying game and then using the results…
Edge-matching problems, also called edge matching puzzles, are abstractions of placement problems with neighborhood conditions. Pieces with colored edges have to be placed on a board such that adjacent edges have the same color. The problem…
The research on coalitional games has focused on how to share the reward among a coalition such that players are incentivised to collaborate together. It assumes that the (deterministic or stochastic) characteristic function is known in…