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Consider the following Maker-Breaker game. Fix a finite subset $S\subset\mathbb{N}$ of the naturals. The players Maker and Breaker take turns choosing previously unclaimed natural numbers. Maker wins by eventually building a homothetic copy…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Hannah Alpert , Liam Barham , Brian Freidin , Ian Tan , Alexandra Weiner

We revisit the problem of designing optimal, individually rational matching mechanisms (in a general sense, allowing for cycles in directed graphs), where each player --- who is associated with a subset of vertices --- matches as many of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-09-15 Avrim Blum , Ioannis Caragiannis , Nika Haghtalab , Ariel D. Procaccia , Eviatar B. Procaccia , Rohit Vaish

The Maker-Breaker domination game is played on a graph $G$ by Dominator and Staller who alternate turns selecting an unplayed vertex of $G$. The goal of Dominator is that the vertices he selected during the game form a dominating set while…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-07-24 Boštjan Brešar , Tanja Dravec , Kirsti Kuenzel , Douglas F. Rall

The classical Maker-Breaker positional game is played on a board which is a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, with two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately claiming vertices of $\mathcal{H}$ until all the vertices are claimed. When the game…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Guillaume Bagan , Quentin Deschamps , Florian Galliot , Mirjana Mikalački , Nacim Oijid

We investigate concurrent two-player win/lose stochastic games on finite graphs with prefix-independent objectives. We characterize subgame optimal strategies and use this characterization to show various memory transfer results: 1) For a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Benjamin Bordais , Patricia Bouyer , Stéphane Le Roux

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-06-05 Pu Gao , Bogumil Kaminski , Calum MacRury , Pawel Pralat

We consider the problem of constructing a graph of minimum degree $k\ge 1$ in the following controlled random graph process, introduced recently by Frieze, Krivelevich and Michaeli. Suppose the edges of the complete graph on $n$ vertices…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-30 Kyriakos Katsamaktsis , Shoham Letzter

We show that Maker wins the Maker-Breaker perfect matching game in $\frac{n}{2}+o(n)$ turns when the bias is at least $\frac{n}{\log{n}}-\frac{f(n)n}{(\log{n})^{5/4}}$, for any $f$ going to infinity with $n$ and $n$ sufficiently large (in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-12-09 Noah Brustle , Sarah Clusiau , Vishnu V. Narayan , Ndiamé Ndiaye , Bruce Reed , Ben Seamone

In a strong game played on the edge set of a graph G there are two players, Red and Blue, alternating turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of G (with Red playing first). The winner is the first one to claim all the edges of some…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-07-19 Asaf Ferber , Pascal Pfister

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a connected graph using distance probes, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West showed that for any $n$-vertex…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-11-23 John Haslegrave , Richard A. B. Johnson , Sebastian Koch

This paper studies the Best-of-K Bandit game: At each time the player chooses a subset S among all N-choose-K possible options and observes reward max(X(i) : i in S) where X is a random vector drawn from a joint distribution. The objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-22 Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson , Benjamin Recht

In an introductory paper on dollar game played on a graph, Matt Baker wrote the following: ``The total number of borrowing moves required to win the game when playing the 'borrowing binge strategy' is independent of which borrowing moves…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-08-25 Marine Cases-Thomas

In a seminal paper on finding large matchings in sparse random graphs, Karp and Sipser proposed two algorithms for this task. The second algorithm has been intensely studied, but due to technical difficulties, the first algorithm has…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-11-28 Michael Anastos

We study two types of two player, perfect information games with no chance moves, played on the edge set of the binomial random graph ${\mathcal G}(n,p)$. In each round of the $(1 : q)$ Waiter-Client Hamiltonicity game, the first player,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-02-17 Dan Hefetz , Michael Krivelevich , Wei En Tan

Let $d(x,y)$ denote the length of a shortest path between vertices $x$ and $y$ in a graph $G$ with vertex set $V$. For a positive integer $k$, let $d_k(x,y)=\min\{d(x,y), k+1\}$ and $R_k\{x,y\}=\{z\in V: d_k(x,z) \neq d_k(y,z)\}$. A set $S…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-01-02 Cong X. Kang , Eunjeong Yi

We consider a variation on Maker-Breaker games on graphs or digraphs where the edges have random costs. We assume that Maker wishes to choose the edges of a spanning tree, but wishes to minimise his cost. Meanwhile Breaker wants to make…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-11-21 Patrick Bennett , Alan Frieze

A graph is beyond-planar if it can be drawn in the plane with a specific restriction on crossings. Several types of beyond-planar graphs have been investigated, such as k-planar if every edge is crossed at most k times and RAC if edges can…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Franz J. Brandenburg

We study convergence rates of random-order best-response dynamics in games on networks with linear best responses and strategic substitutes. Combining formal analysis with numerical simulations we identify phenomena that lead to slow…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Wojciech Misiak , Marcin Dziubiński

Gameplay under various forms of uncertainty has been widely studied. Feldman et al. (2010) studied a particularly low-information setting in which one observes the opponent's actions but no payoffs, not even one's own, and introduced an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Avrim Blum , Melissa Dutz

In a Maker-Breaker game there are two players, Maker and Breaker, where Maker wins if they create a specified structure while Breaker wins if they prevent Maker from winning indefinitely. A $3$-term arithmetic progression, or $3$-AP, is a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-01-13 Albert Cao , Felix Christian Clemen , Sean English , Xiaojian Li , Tatum Schmidt , Leeann Xoubi , Weian Yin