Related papers: Sprague-Grundy values and complexity for LCTR
Node-Kayles is a well-known impartial combinatorial game played on graphs, where players alternately select a vertex and remove it along with its neighbors. By the Sprague-Grundy theorem, every position of an impartial game corresponds to a…
We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can…
In this paper, we consider two-player impartial games with a pass-move. A disjunctive compound of games is a position in which, on each turn, the current player chooses one of the components and makes a legal move in it. For disjunctive…
We establish a relation between the Sprague-Grundy function $\text{sg}$ of a $p$-saturation of Welter's game and the degrees of the ordinary irreducible representations of symmetric groups. In this game, a position can be viewed as a…
Past efforts to classify impartial three-player combinatorial games (the theories of Li and Straffin) have made various restrictive assumptions about the rationality of one's opponents and the formation and behavior of coalitions. One may…
Given a hypergraph $\cH \subseteq 2^I \setminus \{\emptyset\}$ on the ground set $I = \{1, \ldots, n\}$, we assign to each $i \in I$ a nonnegative integer $x_i$, that is a pile of $x_i$ tokens, and consider the following generalization of…
We consider a generalization of the classical game of $NIM$ called hypergraph $NIM$. Given a hypergraph $\cH$ on the ground set $V = \{1, \ldots, n\}$ of $n$ piles of stones, two players alternate in choosing a hyperedge $H \in \cH$ and…
We settle two long-standing complexity-theoretical questions-open since 1981 and 1993-in combinatorial game theory (CGT). We prove that the Grundy value (a.k.a. nim-value, or nimber) of Undirected Geography is PSPACE-complete to compute.…
Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…
The concept of nimbers--a.k.a. Grundy-values or nim-values--is fundamental to combinatorial game theory. Nimbers provide a complete characterization of strategic interactions among impartial games in their disjunctive sums as well as the…
Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…
A comply/constrain game or a game with a Muller twist is a game where the next player is allowed to place constraints on opponent's next move. We develop a closed form formula for the Grundy value of the single-pile subtraction game where…
We consider an {\em enforce operator} on impartial rulesets similar to the Muller Twist and the comply/constrain operator of Smith and St\u anic\u a, 2002. Applied to the rulesets A and B, on each turn the opponent enforces one of the…
Given two finite sets of integers $S\subseteq\NNN\setminus\{0\}$ and $D\subseteq\NNN\setminus\{0,1\}$,the impartial combinatorial game $\IMARK(S,D)$ is played on a heap of tokens. From a heap of $n$ tokens, each player can moveeither to a…
Two players alternate moves in the following impartial combinatorial game: Given a finitely generated abelian group $A$, a move consists of picking some nonzero element $a \in A$. The game then continues with the quotient group $A/ \langle…
In recent years, constrained optimization has become increasingly relevant to the machine learning community, with applications including Neyman-Pearson classification, robust optimization, and fair machine learning. A natural approach to…
First, we consider the problem of deciding whether a nonlocal game admits a perfect entangled strategy that uses projective measurements on a maximally entangled shared state. Via a polynomial-time Karp reduction, we show that independent…
We present a strong solution of the board game pentago, computed using exhaustive parallel retrograde analysis in 4 hours on 98304 ($3 \times 2^{15}$) threads of NERSC's Cray Edison. At $3.0 \times 10^{15}$ states, pentago is the largest…
A finite impartial game is a two-player game in which the players take turns making moves and the game ends after finitely many moves. In this paper, we study a class of finite impartial games introduced by H.~Lenstra, which we call coin…
Gimbert and Horn gave an algorithm for solving simple stochastic games with running time O(r! n) where n is the number of positions of the simple stochastic game and r is the number of its coin toss positions. Chatterjee et al. pointed out…