Related papers: Chess is hard even for a single player
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 \emph{graph grabbing game} is a two-player game on a weighted connected graph in which two players, Alice and Bob, alternatively remove non-cut vertices one by one to gain the weights on them. Alice wins the game if she gains at least…
A 5x5 board is the smallest board on which one can set up all kind of chess pieces as a start position. We consider Gardner's minichess variant in which all pieces are set as in a standard chessboard (from Rook to King). This game has…
Recently the matcher game was introduced. In this game, two players create a maximal matching by one player repeatedly choosing a vertex and the other player choosing a $K_2$ containing that vertex. One player tries to minimize the result…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
In the Binary Networked Public Goods game, every player needs to decide if she participates in a public project whose utility is shared equally by the community. We study the problem of deciding if there exists a pure strategy Nash…
In this paper we study a single player game consisting of $n$ black checkers and $m$ white checkers, called shifting the checkers. We have proved that the minimum number of steps needed to play the game for general $n$ and $m$ is $nm + n +…
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…
The guarding game is a game in which several cops try to guard a region in a (directed or undirected) graph against Robber. Robber and the cops are placed on the vertices of the graph; they take turns in moving to adjacent vertices (or…
We analyze the computational complexity of Tetris clearing (determining whether the player can clear an initial board using a given sequence of pieces) and survival (determining whether the player can avoid losing before placing all the…
We solve the problem of one-dimensional Peg Solitaire. In particular, we show that the set of configurations that can be reduced to a single peg forms a regular language, and that a linear-time algorithm exists for reducing any…
We introduce and study pawn games, a class of two-player zero-sum turn-based graph games. A turn-based graph game proceeds by placing a token on an initial vertex, and whoever controls the vertex on which the token is located, chooses its…
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…
The $m \times n$ king graph consists of all locations on an $m \times n$ chessboard, where edges are legal moves of a chess king. %where each vertex represents a square on a chessboard and each edge is a legal move. Let $P_{m \times n}(z)$…
We study the following combinatorial game played by two players, Alice and Bob, which generalizes the Pizza game considered by Brown, Winkler and others. Given a connected graph G with nonnegative weights assigned to its vertices, the…
We characterize Nash equilibrium by postulating coherent behavior across varying games. Nash equilibrium is the only solution concept that satisfies the following axioms: (i) strictly dominant actions are played with positive probability,…
We define the Sign Game as a two-player game played on a simple undirected mathematical graph $G$. The players alternate turns, assigning vertices of $G$ either $1$ or $-1$, and edges take on the value of the product of their endvertices.…
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 connected domination game is played just as the domination game, with an additional requirement that at each stage of the game the vertices played induce a connected subgraph. The number of moves in a D-game (an S-game, resp.) on a…
We analyze the structure of the state space of chess by means of transition path sampling Monte Carlo simulation. Based on the typical number of moves required to transpose a given configuration of chess pieces into another, we conclude…