Related papers: Chess is hard even for a single player

We define a two-player combinatorial game in which players take alternate turns; each turn consists on deleting a vertex of a graph, together with all the edges containing such vertex. If any vertex became isolated by a player's move then…

Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…

This paper introduced a pursuit and evasion game to be played on a connected graph. One player moves invisibly around the graph, and the other player must guess his position. At each time step the second player guesses a vertex, winning if…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. A ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards, where one after…

The game of cops and robber is a pursuit-evasion game played on graphs that has been extensively studied. Traditionally the game is played with one or more cops and only one robber, but in this paper we consider the game played with…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…

The graph grabbing game is played on a non-negatively weighted connected graph by Alice and Bob who alternately claim a non-cut vertex from the remaining graph, where Alice plays first, to maximize the weights on their respective claimed…

In this paper we introduce and study the domination game on hypergraphs. This is played on a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ by two players, namely Dominator and Staller, who alternately select vertices such that each selected vertex enlarges the…

We consider a two player simultaneous-move game where the two players each select any permissible $n$-sided die for a fixed integer $n$. A player wins if the outcome of his roll is greater than that of his opponent. Remarkably, for $n>3$,…

We study a simple graph-based classical secret sharing scheme: every player's share consists of a random key together with the encryption of the secret with the keys of his neighbours. A characterisation of the authorised and forbidden sets…

Cops and Robbers is a game played on a graph where a set of cops attempt to capture a single robber. The game proceeds in rounds, where each round first consists of the cops' turn, followed by the robber's turn. In the cops' turn, every cop…

In this paper we study a variant of the solitaire game Lights-Out, where the player's goal is to turn off a grid of lights. This variant is a two-player impartial game where the goal is to make the final valid move. This version is playable…

The central result of classical game theory states that every finite normal form game has a Nash equilibrium, provided that players are allowed to use randomized (mixed) strategies. However, in practice, humans are known to be bad at…

We study natural strategic games on directed graphs, which capture the idea of coordination in the absence of globally common strategies. We show that these games do not need to have a pure Nash equilibrium and that the problem of…

It is odd that chess grandmasters often disagree in their analysis of positions, sometimes even of simple ones, and that a grandmaster can hold his own against an powerful analytic machine such as Deep Blue. The fact that there must exist…

The notions of captured/lost vertices and dead edges in the Shannon game (Shannon switching game on nodes) are examined using graph theory. Simple methods are presented for identifying some dead edges and some captured sets of vertices,…

Recently, a new model extending the standard replicator equation to a finite set of players connected on an arbitrary graph was developed in evolutionary game dynamics. The players are interpreted as subpopulations of multipopulations…

The game of chess is well-known and widely played all over the world. However, the rules for playing it are rather complex since there are different types of pieces and the ways they are allowed to move depend upon the type of the piece. In…

We expand the theory of pebbling to graphs with weighted edges. In a weighted pebbling game, one player distributes a set amount of weight on the edges of a graph and his opponent chooses a target vertex and places a configuration of…

The gameplay of strategic board games such as chess, Go and Hex is often characterized by combinatorial, relational structures -- capturing distinct interactions and non-local patterns -- and not just images. Nonetheless, most common…