Related papers: Magic: the Gathering is as Hard as Arithmetic
We close the gap in the proof (published by Chen and Lin) of formulas for the minimum number of questions required in the expected case for Mastermind and its variant called AB game, where both games are played with two pegs and $n$ colors.…
Poker is a large complex game of imperfect information, which has been singled out as a major AI challenge problem. Recently there has been a series of breakthroughs culminating in agents that have successfully defeated the strongest human…
We consider the computational complexity of Hearthstone which is a popular online CCG (collectible card game). We reduce a PSPACE-complete problem, the partition game, to perfect information Hearthstone in which there is no hidden…
In increasingly different contexts, it happens that a human player has to interact with artificial players who make decisions following decision-making algorithms. How should the human player play against these algorithms to maximize his…
We consider an n-player symmetric stochastic game with weak interaction between the players. Time is continuous and the horizon and the number of states are finite. We show that the value function of each of the players can be approximated…
We show that, by using multiplicative weights in a game-theoretic thought experiment (and an important convexity result on the composition of multiplicative weights with the relative entropy function), a symmetric bimatrix game (that is, a…
Mathematics has been used in the exploration and enumeration of juggling patterns. In the case when we catch and throw one ball at a time the number of possible juggling patterns is well-known. When we are allowed to catch and throw any…
Two standard algorithms for approximately solving two-player zero-sum concurrent reachability games are value iteration and strategy iteration. We prove upper and lower bounds of 2^(m^(Theta(N))) on the worst case number of iterations…
Combinatorics is a fundamental mathematical discipline as well as an essential component of many mathematical areas, and its study has experienced an impressive growth in recent years. One of the main reasons for this growth is the tight…
Two intimately related new classes of games are introduced and studied: entropy games (EGs) and matrix multiplication games (MMGs). An EG is played on a finite arena by two-and-a-half players: Despot, Tribune and the non-deterministic…
We study the computational complexity of an important property of simple, regular and weighted games, which is decisiveness. We show that this concept can naturally be represented in the context of hypergraph theory, and that decisiveness…
We analyze the computational complexity of two 2-player games involving packing objects into a box. In the first game, players alternate drawing polycubes from a shared pile and placing them into an initially empty box in any available…
Decades of research have been invested in making computer programs for playing games such as Chess and Go. This paper focuses on a new game, Tetris Link, a board game that is still lacking any scientific analysis. Tetris Link has a large…
This paper provides a complexity analysis for the game of dark Chinese chess (a.k.a. "JieQi"), a variation of Chinese chess. Dark Chinese chess combines some of the most complicated aspects of board and card games, such as long-term…
This paper proves that arrangement of music is NP-hard when subject to various constraints: avoiding musical dissonance, limiting how many notes can be played simultaneously, and limiting transition speed between chords. These results imply…
The convexification numerical method with the rigorously established global convergence property is constructed for a problem for the Mean Field Games System of the second order. This is the problem of the retrospective analysis of a game…
In this paper, we study the cooperative card game, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, is a game based on traditional trick-taking card games,…
Due to the lack of coordination, it is unlikely that the selfish players of a strategic game reach a socially good state. A possible way to cope with selfishness is to compute a desired outcome (if it is tractable) and impose it. However…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
From the 1970s up to now, Mastermind, a classic two-player game, has attracted plenty of attention, not only from the public as a popular game, but also from the academic community as a scientific issue. Mastermind with n positions and k…