Related papers: Board games, random boards and long boards
In this short note, we exhibit a draw in the game of Philosopher's Phutball. We construct a position on a 12 x 10 Phutball board from where either player has a drawing strategy, and then generalize it to an m x n board with m-2 >= n >= 10.
The $n$ queens problem considers the maximum number of safe squares on an $n \times n$ chess board when placing $n$ queens; the answer is only known for small $n$. Miller, Sheng and Turek considered instead $n$ randomly placed rooks,…
Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…
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…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
We consider various probabilistic games with piles for one player or two players. In each round of the game, a player randomly chooses to add $a$ or $b$ chips to his pile under the condition that $a$ and $b$ are not necessarily positive. If…
Automatic chess problem or puzzle composition typically involves generating and testing various different positions, sometimes using particular piece sets. Once a position has been generated, it is then usually tested for positional…
Games on graphs provide a natural model for reactive non-terminating systems. In such games, the interaction of two players on an arena results in an infinite path that describes a run of the system. Different settings are used to model…
We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) language called Regular Boardgames (RBG), which is based on the theory of regular languages. The objective of RBG is to join key properties as expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness of the…
The optimal value computation for turned-based stochastic games with reachability objectives, also known as simple stochastic games, is one of the few problems in $NP \cap coNP$ which are not known to be in $P$. However, there are some…
Normally a chess problem must have a unique solution, and is deemed unsound even if there are alternatives that differ only in the order in which the same moves are played. In an enumerative chess problem, the set of moves in the solution…
A generalized $N$-sided die is a random variable $D$ on a sample space of $N$ equally likely outcomes taking values in the set of positive integers. We say of independent $N$ sided dice $D_i, D_j$ that $D_i$ beats $D_j$, written $D_i \to…
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
The following problem is considered. Two players are each required to allocate a quota of~$n$ counters among~$k$ boxes labelled~$1,2,\ldots,k$. At times $t=1,2,3,\ldots$ a random box is identified; the probability of choosing box~$i$…
In this paper, we present a board game: Square War. The game definition of Square War is similar to the classic Chinese board game Go. Then we propose a mathematical problem of the game Square War. Finally, we show that the problem can be…
In a vector balancing game, on step $k$ player 1 chooses a unit vector $v_k$ and player 2 chooses a sign $\varepsilon_k\in \{-1,1\}$, and the position after $n$ steps is $z_n=\sum_1^n\varepsilon_k v_k$. Player 1's target is to make…
We have developed a program called MUDoS (Maastricht University Domineering Solver) that solves Domineering positions in a very efficient way. This enables the solution of known positions so far (up to the 10 x 10 board) much quicker…
We consider the chessboard pebbling problem analyzed by Chung, Graham, Morrison and Odlyzko [3]. We study the number of reachable configurations $G(k)$ and a related double sequence $G(k,m)$. Exact expressions for these are derived, and we…
The usual $n$-in-a-row game is a positional game in which two player alternately claim points in $\bb{Z}^2$ with the winner being the first player to claim $n$ consecutive points in a line. We consider a variant of the game, suggested by…
The game of Othello is one of the world's most complex and popular games that has yet to be computationally solved. Othello has roughly ten octodecillion (10 to the 58th power) possible game records and ten octillion (10 to the 28th power)…