Related papers: Magic: the Gathering is as Hard as Arithmetic
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
The article presents research on the use of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods to create an artificial player for the popular card game "The Lord of the Rings". The game is characterized by complicated rules, multi-stage round…
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…
The game of Othello is one of the world's most complex and popular games that has yet to be computationally solved. Othello has roughly ten octodecillion (10 to the 58th power) possible game records and ten octillion (10 to the 28th power)…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…
This paper investigates the popular card game UNO from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. We define simple and concise mathematical models for the game, including both cooperative and uncooperative versions, and analyze…
Poker is in the family of imperfect information games unlike other games such as chess, connect four, etc which are perfect information game instead. While many perfect information games have been solved, no non-trivial imperfect…
Hex is a well known connection game in which two players attempt to connect opposite sides of the board by colored stones. In 2022, Hamkins and Leonessi introduced an infinite version, in which the goal is to construct a certain kind of…
Usually, to apply game-theoretic methods, we must specify utilities precisely, and we run the risk that the solutions we compute are not robust to errors in this specification. Ordinal games provide an attractive alternative: they require…
A game is rigid if a near-optimal score guarantees, under the sole assumption of the validity of quantum mechanics, that the players are using an approximately unique quantum strategy. Rigidity has a vital role in quantum cryptography as it…
While Poker, as a family of games, has been studied extensively in the last decades, collectible card games have seen relatively little attention. Only recently have we seen an agent that can compete with professional human players in…
The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…
We report the results of a game-theoretic experiment with human players who solve the problems of increasing complexity by cooperating in groups of increasing size. Our experimental environment is set up to make it complicated for players…
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
Deep Reinforcement Learning combined with Fictitious Play shows impressive results on many benchmark games, most of which are, however, single-stage. In contrast, real-world decision making problems may consist of multiple stages, where the…
A king in a directed graph is a node from which each node in the graph can be reached via paths of length at most two. There is a broad literature on tournaments (completely oriented digraphs), and it has been known for more than half a…
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…
In this paper, we study some cards shuffles which are used by magicians. We focus ourselves on the possibility to hit eventually the initial state after several shuffles. This is a classical problem arising in discrete dynamical systems.…