Related papers: Relating Structure and Power: Extended Version
Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…
We begin by reviewing and proving the basic facts of combinatorial game theory. We then consider scoring games (also known as Milnor games or positional games), focusing on the "fixed-length" games for which all sequences of play terminate…
Abramsky, Dawar, and Wang (2017) introduced the pebbling comonad for k-variable counting logic and thereby initiated a line of work that imports category theoretic machinery to finite model theory. Such game comonads have been developed for…
Game comonads, introduced by Abramsky, Dawar and Wang, and developed by Abramsky and Shah, give a categorical semantics for model comparison games. We present an axiomatic account of Feferman-Vaught-Mostowski (FVM) composition theorems…
Pursuing a new approach to the study of infinite games in combinatorics, we introduce the categories $\mathbf{Game}_{A}$ and $\mathbf{Game}_{B}$ and improve some classical results concerning topological games related to the duality between…
The main goal of this paper is to settle a conceptual framework for cooperative game theory in which the notion of composition/aggregation of games is the defining structure. This is done via the mathematical theory of algebraic operads: we…
The analysis of games played on graph-like structures is of increasing importance due to the prevalence of social networks, both virtual and physical, in our daily life. As well as being relevant in computer science, mathematical analysis…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
We present a new Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game approach to collapse results in database theory and we show that, in principle, this approach suffices to prove every natural generic collapse result. Following this approach we can deal with…
The framework of graded semantics uses graded monads to capture behavioural equivalences of varying granularity, for example as found on the linear-time/branching-time spectrum, over general system types. We describe a generic…
Homomorphisms between relational structures play a central role in finite model theory, constraint satisfaction and database theory. A central theme in quantum computation is to show how quantum resources can be used to gain advantage in…
Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e games provide a fundamental method for proving elementary equivalence (and equivalence up to a certain quantifier rank) of relational structures. We investigate the soundness and completeness of this method in the…
Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games are very useful in studying separation and equivalence results in logic. The standard finite Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game characterizes equivalence in first order logic. The standard Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game in…
Coopetition refers to simultaneous cooperation and competition among actors who "cooperate to grow the pie and compete to split it up." Modern socio-technical systems are characterized by strategic coopetition in which actors concomitantly…
We provide a compositional coalgebraic semantics for strategic games. In our framework, like in the semantics of functional programming languages, coalgebras represent the observable behaviour of systems derived from the behaviour of the…
Two structures $A$ and $B$ are $n$-equivalent if player II has a winning strategy in the $n$-move Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e game on $A$ and $B$. In earlier papers we studied $n$-equivalence classes of ordinals and coloured ordinals. In this…
We study multi-structural games, played on two sets $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$ of structures. These games generalize Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"{i}ss\'{e} games. Whereas Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"{i}ss\'{e} games capture the quantifier rank of a…
Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e (EF) games are a basic tool in finite model theory for proving definability lower bounds, with many applications in complexity theory and related areas. They have been applied to study various logics, giving insights…
Fragments of first-order logic over words can often be characterized in terms of finite monoids or finite semigroups. Usually these algebraic descriptions yield decidability of the question whether a given regular language is definable in a…
We define a version of the Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e game in the setting of metric model theory and continuous first-order logic and show that the second player having a winning strategy in a game of length $n$ exactly corresponds to being…