Related papers: Backgammon is Hard
A valuation for a player in a game in extensive form is an assignment of numeric values to the players moves. The valuation reflects the desirability moves. We assume a myopic player, who chooses a move with the highest valuation.…
Complexity theory is a useful tool to study computational issues surrounding the elicitation of preferences, as well as the strategic manipulation of elections aggregating together preferences of multiple agents. We study here the…
Games on graphs provide a natural and powerful model for reactive systems. In this paper, we consider generalized reachability objectives, defined as conjunctions of reachability objectives. We first prove that deciding the winner in such…
We study the complexity of influencing elections through bribery: How computationally complex is it for an external actor to determine whether by a certain amount of bribing voters a specified candidate can be made the election's winner? We…
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…
In this paper, we address a natural question at the intersection of combinatorial game theory and computational complexity: "Can a sum of simple tepid games in canonical form be intractable?" To resolve this fundamental question, we…
Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…
The main result of this paper is that computing the value of a one-clock priced timed game (OCPTG) is PSPACE-hard. Along the way, we provide a family of OCPTGs that have an exponential number of event points. Both results hold even in very…
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…
Algorithms for equilibrium computation generally make no attempt to ensure that the computed strategies are understandable by humans. For instance the strategies for the strongest poker agents are represented as massive binary files. In…
This paper investigates the popular card game UNO from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. We define simple and concise mathematical models for the game, including both cooperative and uncooperative versions, and analyze…
This paper provides a complexity analysis for the game of reconnaissance blind chess (RBC), a recently-introduced variant of chess where each player does not know the positions of the opponent's pieces a priori but may reveal a subset of…
We give a simple proof that assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH), determining the winner of a Rabin game cannot be done in time $2^{o(k \log k)} \cdot n^{O(1)}$, where $k$ is the number of pairs of vertex subsets involved in the…
We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the optimal strategy. The exact blackjack…
We show that the problem of checking if a given nondeterministic parity automaton simulates another given nondeterministic parity automaton is NP-hard. We then adapt the techniques used for this result to show that the problem of checking…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
Temporal graphs are a popular modelling mechanism for dynamic complex systems that extend ordinary graphs with discrete time. Simply put, time progresses one unit per step and the availability of edges can change with time. We consider the…
The intractability of any problem and the randomness of its solutions have an obvious intuitive connection. However, the challenge till now has been that there is no practical way to firmly establish if the solution to a problem is actually…
Dice odds in the board game RISK were first investigated by Tan, fixed by Osbourne, and extended by Blatt. We generalized dice odds further, varying the number of sides and the number of dice used in a single battle. We show that the…
We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…