Related papers: Magic: the Gathering is as Hard as Arithmetic
Poker is one of the most popular card games, whose rational investigation represents also one of the major challenges in several scientific areas, spanning from information theory and artificial intelligence to game theory and statistical…
We propose and analyse a 2-parameter family of 2-player games on two heaps of tokens, and present a strategy based on a class of sequences. The strategy looks easy, but is actually hard. A class of exotic numeration systems is then used,…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
A tournament is an orientation of a complete graph. A vertex that can reach every other vertex within two steps is called a \emph{king}. We study the complexity of finding $k$ kings in a tournament graph. We show that the randomized query…
In this paper we study a cooperative card game called Hanabi from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. In Hanabi, each card has one among $c$ colors and a number between $1$ and $n$. The aim is to make, for each color, a…
In this methodological article on experimental-yet-rigorous enumerative combinatorics, we use two instructive case studies, to show that often, just like Alexander the Great before us, the simple, "cheating" solution to a hard problem is…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
Mastermind is in essence a search problem in which a string of symbols that is kept secret must be found by sequentially playing strings that use the same alphabet, and using the responses that indicate how close are those other strings to…
Coalition formation is a key topic in multi-agent systems. Coalitions enable agents to achieve goals that they may not have been able to achieve on their own. Previous work has shown problems in coalitional games to be computationally hard.…
A card guessing game is played between two players, Guesser and Dealer. At the beginning of the game, the Dealer holds a deck of $n$ cards (labeled $1, ..., n$). For $n$ turns, the Dealer draws a card from the deck, the Guesser guesses…
Several problems in planning and reactive synthesis can be reduced to the analysis of two-player quantitative graph games. {\em Optimization} is one form of analysis. We argue that in many cases it may be better to replace the optimization…
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…
Concurrent games with a fixed number of agents have been thoroughly studied, with various solution concepts and objectives for the agents. In this paper, we consider concurrent games with an arbitrary number of agents, and study the problem…
Representation languages for coalitional games are a key research area in algorithmic game theory. There is an inherent tradeoff between how general a language is, allowing it to capture more elaborate games, and how hard it is…
Mahjong is a very popular tile-based game commonly played by four players. Each player begins with a hand of 13 tiles and, in turn, players draw and discard (i.e., change) tiles until they complete a legal hand using a 14th tile. In this…
This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…
We show that the maximum success probability of players sharing quantum entanglement in a two-player game with classical questions of logarithmic length and classical answers of constant length is NP-hard to approximate to within constant…
This paper considers the effect of riffle shuffling on decks of cards, allowing for some cards to be indistinguishable from other cards. The dual problem of dealing a game with hands, such as bridge or poker, is also considered. The…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
This paper investigates the problems arising in the construction of a program to play the game of contract bridge. These problems include both the difficulty of solving the game's perfect information variant, and techniques needed to…