Related papers: Counting Domineering Positions
For normal play, impartial games, we define penults as those positions in which every option results in an immediate win for the other player. We explore the number of tokens in penults of two positional games, Impartial Tic and Impartial…
We develop a theory of combinatorial games that is appropriate for describing positions in Hex and other monotone set coloring games. We consider two natural conditions on such games: a game is monotone if all moves available to both…
Motivated by recent work of Hanser and Mayers, we study two combinatorial puzzles arising from the theory of Kohnert polynomials. Such polynomials are defined as generating polynomials for certain collections of diagrams consisting of unit…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
Circular Nim is a two-player impartial combinatorial game consisting of $n$ stacks of tokens placed in a circle. A move consists of choosing $k$ consecutive stacks and taking at least one token from one or more of the stacks. The last…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
A checkers-like model game with a simplified set of rules is studied through extensive simulations of agents with different expertise and strategies. The introduction of complementary strategies, in a quite general way, provides a tool to…
Recently, Press and Dyson have proposed a new class of probabilistic and conditional strategies for the two-player iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, so-called zero-determinant strategies. A player adopting zero-determinant strategies is able to…
In Parts I-III we showed that the number of ways to place $q$ nonattacking queens or similar chess pieces on an $n\times n$ chessboard is a quasipolynomial function of $n$ whose coefficients are essentially polynomials in $q$. In this part…
We present two zero-sum games modeling situations where one player attacks (or hides in) a finite dimensional nonempty compact set, and the other tries to prevent the attack (or find him). The first game, called patrolling game, corresponds…
We introduce a new class of games where each player's aim is to randomise her strategic choices in order to affect the other players' expectations aside from her own. The way each player intends to exert this influence is expressed through…
We introduce two-level discounted games played by two players on a perfect-information stochastic game graph. The upper level game is a discounted game and the lower level game is an undiscounted reachability game. Two-level games model…
This paper is a twofold contribution. First, it contributes to the problem of enumerating some classes of simple games and in particular provides the number of weighted games with minimum and the number of weighted games for the dual class…
A poset game is a two-player game played over a partially ordered set (poset) in which the players alternate choosing an element of the poset, removing it and all elements greater than it. The first player unable to select an element of the…
Stochastic games are an important class of problems that generalize Markov decision processes to game theoretic scenarios. We consider finite state two-player zero-sum stochastic games over an infinite time horizon with discounted rewards.…
We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs. Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability $p_{F}$ for the existence of Maker's strategy to claim a member of $F$ in the unbiased game played on…
Ranking the participants of a tournament has applications in voting, paired comparisons analysis, sports and other domains. In this paper we introduce bipartite tournaments, which model situations in which two different kinds of entity…
Players are arranged on a regular lattice and coded with a specific strategy for a pre-defined game. Each player sums their payoffs from playing the game with each of their neighbors, and then adopts the strategy of the most successful…
From the standpoint of game theory, dominoes is a game that has not received much attention (specially the variety known as draw). It is usually thought that this game is already solved, given general results in game theory. However, the…
We indulge in what mathematicians call frivolous activities. In Arithmetic Billiards, a ball is bouncing around in a rectangle. In Parity Checkers we place checkers on a checkerboard under certain parity constraints. Both activities turn…