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Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
We study the computational complexity of a perfect-information two-player game proposed by Aigner and Fromme. The game takes place on an undirected graph where n simultaneously moving cops attempt to capture a single robber, all moving at…
We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…
Snake is a classic computer game, which has been around for decades. Based on this game, we study the game of Snake on arbitrary undirected graphs. A snake forms a simple path that has to move to an apple while avoiding colliding with…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
When agents are acting together, they may need a simple mechanism to decide on joint actions. One possibility is to have the agents express their preferences in the form of a ballot and use a voting rule to decide the winning action(s).…
Simple games cover voting systems in which a single alternative, such as a bill or an amendment, is pitted against the status quo. A simple game or a yes-no voting system is a set of rules that specifies exactly which collections of ``yea''…
In many applications, we want to influence the decisions of independent agents by designing incentives for their actions. We revisit a fundamental problem in this area, called GAME IMPLEMENTATION: Given a game in standard form and a set of…
Iterated admissibility is a well-known and important concept in classical game theory, e.g. to determine rational behaviors in multi-player matrix games. As recently shown by Berwanger, this concept can be soundly extended to infinite games…
We study the complexity of computing stationary Nash equilibrium (NE) in n-player infinite-horizon general-sum stochastic games. We focus on the problem of computing NE in such stochastic games when each player is restricted to choosing a…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
Generalized Geography is a combinatorial game played on a directed graph. Players take turns moving a token from vertex to vertex, deleting a vertex after moving the token away from it. A player unable to move loses. It is well known that…
The Taxman game has proven to be hard to solve optimally, so efforts have been made to find heuristic strategies that do well in practice. We present results on the NP-hardness of a variant of the game via an equivalence to a particular…
We study in depth the class of games with opacity condition, which are two-player games with imperfect information in which one of the players only has imperfect information, and where the winning condition relies on the information he has…
We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…
Poset games have been the object of mathematical study for over a century, but little has been written on the computational complexity of determining important properties of these games. In this introduction we develop the fundamentals of…
It is proved that in card games similar to 'Beggar-my-neighbour' the mathematical expectation of the playing time is finite, provided that the player who starts the round is determined randomly and the deck is shuffled when the trick is…
In an Avoider-Enforcer game, we are given a hypergraph. Avoider and Enforcer alternate in claiming an unclaimed vertex, until all the vertices of the hypergraph are claimed. Enforcer wins if Avoider claims all vertices of an edge; Avoider…
This paper studies complexity theoretic aspects of quantum refereed games, which are abstract games between two competing players that send quantum states to a referee, who performs an efficiently implementable joint measurement on the two…
We build a general theory for characterizing the computational complexity of motion planning of robot(s) through a graph of "gadgets", where each gadget has its own state defining a set of allowed traversals which in turn modify the…