Related papers: Playing cards with Vizing's demon
L.M.Vitaver [1962] and G.I.Minty [1962] suggested criteria for vertex colorability of a graph in at most a given number of colors; these criteria are stated in terms of the orientation of the edges. One additional criterion of this kind is…
We study biased {\em orientation games}, in which the board is the complete graph $K_n$, and Maker and Breaker take turns in directing previously undirected edges of $K_n$. At the end of the game, the obtained graph is a tournament. Maker…
The Colour Refinement procedure and its generalisation to higher dimensions, the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm, are central subroutines in approaches to the graph isomorphism problem. In an iterative fashion, Colour Refinement computes a…
We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of…
Graph coloring problems are a central topic of study in the theory of algorithms. We study the problem of partially coloring partially colorable graphs. For $\alpha \leq 1$ and $k \in \mathbb{Z}^+$, we say that a graph $G=(V,E)$ is…
Xuding Zhu introduced a refined scale of choosability in 2020 and observed that the four color theorem is tight on this scale. We formalize and explore this idea of tightness in what we call strictly colorable graphs. We then characterize…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
In evolutionary game theory, repeated two-player games are used to study strategy evolution in a population under natural selection. As the evolution greatly depends on the interaction structure, there has been growing interests in studying…
In this paper, we study the algorithmic complexity of the Mastermind game, where results are single-color black pegs. This differs from the usual dual-color version of the game, but better corresponds to applications in genetics. We show…
Peg solitaire is a game generalized to connected graphs by Beeler and Hoilman. In the game pegs are placed on all but one vertex. If $xyz$ form a 3-vertex path and $x$ and $y$ each have a peg but $z$ does not, then we can remove the pegs at…
There are a number of well-known problems and conjectures about partitioning graphs to satisfy local constraints. For example, the majority colouring conjecture of Kreutzer, Oum, Seymour, van der Zypen and Wood states that every directed…
We consider the graph coloring game, a game in which two players take turns properly coloring the vertices of a graph, with one player attempting to complete a proper coloring, and the other player attempting to prevent a proper coloring.…
Given a proper (list) colouring of a graph $G$, a recolouring step changes the colour at a single vertex to another colour (in its list) that is currently unused on its neighbours, hence maintaining a proper colouring. Suppose that each…
A matching game is a cooperative profit game defined on an edge-weighted graph, where the players are the vertices and the profit of a coalition is the maximum weight of matchings in the subgraph induced by the coalition. A population…
Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…
Guessing games for directed graphs were introduced by Riis for studying multiple unicast network coding problems. In a guessing game, the players toss generalised dice and can see some of the other outcomes depending on the structure of an…
The recently discovered Parrondo's paradox claims that two losing games can result, under random or periodic alternation of their dynamics, in a winning game: "losing+losing=winning". In this paper we follow Parrondo's philosophy of…
Uncover the vertices of a given graph, deterministic or random, in random order; we consider both a discrete-time and a continuous-time version. We study the evolution of the number of visible edges, and show convergence after normalization…
Domineering is a combinatorial game played on a subset of a rectangular grid between two players. Each board position can be put into one of four outcome classes based on who the winner will be if both players play optimally. In this note,…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…