Related papers: Strategy-Stealing is Non-Constructive

Strategic deception is an act of manipulating the opponent's perception to gain strategic advantages. In this paper, we study synthesis of deceptive winning strategies in two-player turn-based zero-sum reachability games on graphs with…

Poset games are a class of combinatorial game that remain unsolved. Soltys and Wilson proved that computing wining strategies is in \textbf{PSPACE} and aside from special cases such as Nim and N-Free games, \textbf{P} time algorithms for…

Subset take-away is a two-player game involving a fixed finite set A. Players alternate choosing a proper, non-empty subset of A, with the condition that one may not name a set containing a set that was named earlier. A player unable to…

This paper coins the notion of Joker games, a variant of concurrent games where the players are not strictly adversarial. Instead, Player 1 can get help from Player 2 by playing a Joker move. We formalize these games as cost games and…

Security games model the confrontation between a defender protecting a set of targets and an attacker who tries to capture them. A variant of these games assumes security interdependence between targets, facilitating contagion of an attack.…

Combinatorial Scoring games, with the property `extra pass moves for a player does no harm', are characterized. The characterization involves an order embedding of Conway's Normal-play games. Also, we give a theorem for comparing games with…

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game that produces many counter-intuitive and complex behaviors in a social environment, based on very simple basic rules. It illustrates that cooperation can be a good thing even in a competitive world,…

The Maker-Maker convention of positional games is played on a hypergraph whose edges are interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex, aiming at being first to pick all the vertices of some edge.…

The number of quantifiers needed to express first-order properties is captured by two-player combinatorial games called multi-structural (MS) games. We play these games on linear orders and strings, and introduce a technique we call…

We study two positional games played on hypergraphs, whose edges may be interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex of the hypergraph. We say a player fills an edge if that player has picked all…

Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…

The game of best choice (or "secretary problem") is a model for making an irrevocable decision among a fixed number of candidate choices that are presented sequentially in random order, one at a time. Because the classically optimal…

We consider the following combinatorial game: two players, Fast and Slow, claim $k$-element subsets of $[n]=\{1,2,...,n\}$ alternately, one at each turn, such that both players are allowed to pick sets that intersect all previously claimed…

Consider concurrent, infinite duration, two-player win/lose games played on graphs. If the winning condition satisfies some simple requirement, the existence of Player 1 winning (finite-memory) strategies is equivalent to the existence of…

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…

In this paper we experiment with a 2-player strategy board game where playing models are evolved using reinforcement learning and neural networks. The models are evolved to speed up automatic game development based on human involvement at…

In this note, we prove the existence of an equilibrium concept, dubbed conditional strategy equilibrium, for non-cooperative games in which a strategy of a player is a function from the other players' actions to her own actions. We study…

This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…

We consider zero-sum stochastic games with perfect information and finitely many states and actions. The payoff is computed by a function which associates to each infinite sequence of states and actions a real number. We prove that if the…

We introduce variants of the Maker-Breaker and Waiter-Client games, which we call \emph{stotting}, in which a player grants a slight advantage to the opponent. We prove that a winning strategy in either stotting variant yields winning…