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The game of Paintbucket was recently introduced by Amundsen and Erickson. It is played on a rectangular grid of black and white pixels. The players alternately fill in one of their opponent's connected components with their own color, until…
A subset of the vertex set of a graph is geodetically convex if it contains every vertex on any shortest path between two elements of the subset. The convex hull of a set of vertices is the smallest convex set containing the set. We study…
Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…
{\sc Yama Nim} is a variant of two piles {\sc Nim}. In this ruleset, the player chosses one of the piles and removes at least two tokens from the pile. In the same move, the player adds one token to the other pile. We show the winning…
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…
We consider problems in which a simple path of fixed length, in an undirected graph, is to be shifted from a start position to a goal position by moves that add an edge to either end of the path and remove an edge from the other end. We…
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 study zero-sum games, a variant of the classical combinatorial Subtraction games (studied for example in the monumental work "Winning Ways", by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy), called Cumulative Subtraction (CS). Two players alternate in…
Amazons is a board game which combines elements of Chess and Go. It has become popular in recent years, and has served as a useful platform for both game-theoretic study and AI games research. Buro showed that simple Amazons endgames are…
The game subset take-away begins with a simplicial complex \Delta. Two players take turns removing any element of \Delta as well as all other elements which contain it, and the last player able to move wins. Graph Chomp is a special case of…
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…
We consider zero-sum games in which players move between adjacent states, where in each pair of adjacent states one state dominates the other. The states in our game can represent positional advantages in physical conflict such as high…
We consider a search and rescue game introduced recently by the first author. An immobile target or targets (for example, injured hikers) are hidden on a graph. The terrain is assumed to dangerous, so that when any given vertex of the graph…
The semi-random graph process is a single player game in which the player is initially presented an empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a vertex $u$ is presented to the player independently and uniformly at random. The player then…
Node-Kayles is a well-known impartial combinatorial game played on graphs, where players alternately select a vertex and remove it along with its neighbors. By the Sprague-Grundy theorem, every position of an impartial game corresponds to a…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
Placement games are a subclass of combinatorial games which are played on graphs. We will demonstrate that one can construct simplicial complexes corresponding to a placement game, and this game could be considered as a game played on these…
The game domination number is a graph invariant that arises from a game, which is related to graph domination in a similar way as the game chromatic number is related to graph coloring. In this paper we show that verifying whether the game…
Many autonomous agents, such as intelligent vehicles, are inherently required to interact with one another. Game theory provides a natural mathematical tool for robot motion planning in such interactive settings. However, tractable…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…