Related papers: On the Computational Complexities of Various Geogr…
The game Arc-Kayles is played on an undirected graph with two players taking turns deleting an edge and its endpoints from the graph. We study a generalization of this game, Weighted Arc Kayles (WAK for short), played on graphs with…
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…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
Partially-ordered set games, also called poset games, are a class of two-player combinatorial games. The playing field consists of a set of elements, some of which are greater than other elements. Two players take turns removing an element…
We study the parameterized complexity of several positional games. Our main result is that Short Generalized Hex is W[1]-complete parameterized by the number of moves. This solves an open problem from Downey and Fellows' influential list of…
Often, a given selection game studied in the literature has a known dual game. In dual games, a winning strategy for a player in either game may be used to create a winning strategy for the opponent in the dual. For example, the Rothberger…
Parity games are games that are played on directed graphs whose vertices are labeled by natural numbers, called priorities. The players push a token along the edges of the digraph. The winner is determined by the parity of the greatest…
We study routing games where every agent sequentially decides her next edge when she obtains the green light at each vertex. Because every edge only has capacity to let out one agent per round, an edge acts as a FIFO waiting queue that…
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…
Inspired by a chessboard puzzle of Dudeney, the general position problem in graph theory asks for a largest set $S$ of vertices in a graph such that no three elements of $S$ lie on a common shortest path. The number of vertices in such a…
In the graph sharing game, two players share a connected graph $G$ with non-negative weights assigned to the vertices, claiming and collecting the vertices of $G$ one by one, while keeping the set of all claimed vertices connected through…
This work is concerned with the study of the Game of Graph Nim -- a class of two-player combinatorial games -- on graphs with $4$ edges. To each edge of such a graph is assigned a positive-integer-valued edge-weight, and during each round…
In repeated games, players choose actions concurrently at each step. We consider a parameterized setting of repeated games in which the players form a population of an arbitrary size. Their utility functions encode a reachability objective.…
Consider QBF, the Quantified Boolean Formula problem, as a combinatorial game ruleset. The problem is rephrased as determining the winner of the game where two opposing players take turns assigning values to boolean variables. In this…
Genetic programming is the practice of evolving formulas using crossover and mutation of genes representing functional operations. Motivated by genetic evolution we develop and solve two combinatorial games, and we demonstrate some…
We consider combinatorial avoidance and achievement games based on graph Ramsey theory: The players take turns in coloring still uncolored edges of a graph G, each player being assigned a distinct color, choosing one edge per move. In…
Classic reachability games on graphs are zero-sum games, where the goal of one player, Eve, is to visit a vertex from a given target set, and that of other player, Adam, is to prevent this. Generalised reachability games, studied by…
We investigate the combinatorial game Slime Trail.This game is played on a graph with a starting piece in a node. Each player's objective is to reach one of their own goal nodes. Every turn the current player moves the piece and deletes the…
We introduce achievement positional games, a convention for positional games which encompasses the Maker-Maker and Maker-Breaker conventions. We consider two hypergraphs, one red and one blue, on the same vertex set. Two players, Left and…
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…