Related papers: Backgammon is Hard
Games on recursive game graphs can be used to reason about the control flow of sequential programs with recursion. In games over recursive game graphs, the most natural notion of strategy is the modular strategy, i.e., a strategy that is…
We consider a game in which a blindfolded player attempts to set $n$ counters lying on the vertices of a rotating regular $n$-gon table simultaneously to $0$. When the counters count$\pmod{m}$ we simplify the argument of Bar Yehuda, Etzion,…
Candogan et al. (2011) provide an orthogonal direct-sum decomposition of finite games into potential, harmonic and nonstrategic components. In this paper we study the issue of decomposing games that are strategically equivalent from a…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
We prove that finding an epsilon-Nash equilibrium in a succinctly representable game with many players is PPAD-hard for constant epsilon. Our proof uses succinct games, i.e. games whose payoff function is represented by a circuit. Our…
Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the…
In many combinatorial games, one can prove that the first player wins under best play using a simple but non-constructive argument called strategy-stealing. This work is about the complexity behind these proofs: how hard is it to actually…
Quantitative measures of randomness in games are useful for game design and have implications for gambling law. We treat the outcome of a game as a random variable and derive a closed-form expression and estimator for the variance in the…
In this article, we study the decision-making process of chess players by using a chess engine to evaluate the moves across different pools of games. We quantified the decisiveness of each move during the games using a metric derived from…
We show that solving delay games with winning conditions given by deterministic and nondeterministic weak Muller automata is 2EXPTIME-complete respectively 3EXPTIME-complete. Furthermore, doubly and triply exponential lookahead is necessary…
Consider a two-player game repeated N times. Player 1 can choose between two styles (for interpretability, offensive and defensive), whereas Player 2 uses a single fixed style. Let X N\,:= \#wins -\#losses for Player 1 after N games, and…
We study the complexity of computing a uniform Nash equilibrium on a non-win-lose bimatrix game. It is known that such a problem is NP-complete even if a bimatrix game is win-lose (Bonifaci et al., 2008). Fortunately, if a win-lose bimatrix…
We show that it is NP-Complete to decide whether a bimatrix game is degenerate and it is Co-NP-Complete to decide whether a bimatrix game is nondegenerate.
Combinatorial games played between two players, called Spoiler and Duplicator, have often been used to capture syntactic properties of formal logical languages. For instance, the widely used Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e (EF) game captures the…
In this paper we study the computational complexity of computing an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) in multi-player symmetric games. For two-player games, deciding existence of an ESS is complete for {\Sigma} 2 , the second level of the…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
We consider the cops and robber game variant consisting of one cop and one robber on time-varying graphs (TVG). The considered TVGs are edge periodic graphs, i.e., for each edge, a binary string $s_e$ determines in which time step the edge…
Temporal graphs extend ordinary graphs with discrete time that affects the availability of edges. We consider solving games played on temporal graphs where one player aims to explore the graph, i.e., visit all vertices. The complexity…
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…
We study the impartial game PAP (``permutations avoiding patterns''), in which players take turns choosing patterns to avoid. We define a set of length $k$ patterns, $B_k$, and show that it is the unique minimal monotone-forcing subset of…