Related papers: The Game of Blocking Pebbles

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in pebble games in the context of proof complexity. Pebbling has proven a useful tool for studying resolution-based proof systems when comparing the strength of different subsystems, showing…

Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…

The crossword-like patterns of tiles in Scrabble form connected graphs of occupied sites on a square lattice. We find the most structureless description that reproduces means and covariances observed in real Scrabble games by adapting a…

In this paper we introduce and study {\em all-pay bidding games}, a class of two player, zero-sum games on graphs. The game proceeds as follows. We place a token on some vertex in the graph and assign budgets to the two players. Each turn,…

We will describe a combinatorial game that models the problem of resolution of singularities of algebraic varieties over a field of characteristic zero. By giving a winning strategy for this game, we give another proof of the existence of…

We study two-player games on finite graphs. Turn-based games have many nice properties, but concurrent games are harder to tame: e.g. turn-based stochastic parity games have positional optimal strategies, whereas even basic concurrent…

Given a distribution of pebbles on the vertices of a graph, say that we can pebble a vertex if a pebble is left on it after some sequence of moves, each of which takes two pebbles from some vertex and places one on an adjacent vertex. A…

Using a notation of corner between edges when graph has a fixed rotation, i.e. cyclical order of edges around vertices, we define combinatorial objects - combinatorial maps as pairs of permutations, one for vertices and one for faces.…

The domatic number of a graph is the maximum number of pairwise disjoint dominating sets admitted by the graph. We introduce a game based around this graph invariant. The domatic number game is played on a graph $G$ by two players, Alice…

We consider two-player stochastic games played on a finite graph for infinitely many rounds. Stochastic games generalize both Markov decision processes (MDP) by adding an adversary player, and two-player deterministic games by adding…

The game Nofil is a two-player combinatorial game in which players take turns marking points of a design such that the set of marked points does not contain a block. Equivalently, we can think of the points as being deleted from the design…

Game theory is the mathematical framework for analyzing strategic interactions in conflict and competition situations. In recent years quantum game theory has earned the attention of physicists, and has emerged as a branch of quantum…

The present paper deals with connected subtraction games in graphs, which are generalization of takeaway games. In a connected subtraction game, two players alternate removing a connected sub-graph from a given connected game-graph,…

We consider a simple game, the $k$-regular graph game, in which players take turns adding edges to an initially empty graph subject to the constraint that the degrees of vertices cannot exceed $k$. We show a sharp topological threshold for…

The numbers game is a one-player game played on a finite simple graph with certain ``amplitudes'' assigned to its edges and with an initial assignment of real numbers to its nodes. The moves of the game successively transform the numbers at…

Game coloring is a well-studied two-player game in which each player properly colors one vertex of a graph at a time until all the vertices are colored. An `eternal' version of game coloring is introduced in this paper in which the vertices…

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…

We introduce a topological combinatorial game called the Region Smoothing Swap Game. The game is played on a game board derived from the connected shadow of a link diagram on a (possibly non-orientable) surface by smoothing at crossings.…

We study strategic games on weighted directed graphs, in which the payoff of a player is defined as the sum of the weights on the edges from players who chose the same strategy, augmented by a fixed non-negative integer bonus for picking a…

We create a new two-player game on the Sperner Triangle based on Sperner's lemma. Our game has simple rules and several desirable properties. First, the game is always certain to have a winner. Second, like many other interesting games such…