Related papers: A Practical Method for Preventing Forced Wins in U…
Consider a rooted Galton-Watson tree $T$, to each of whose edges we assign, independently, a weight that equals $+1$ with probability $p_{1}$, $0$ with probability $p_{0}$ and $-1$ with probability $p_{-1}=1-p_{1}-p_{0}$. We play a game on…
We introduce a two-player game, in which each player extends a given sequence by picking a free element in a domain D of the real line. The aim of the players is to control the parity of the number of transpositions necessary to put the…
We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…
We introduce a betting game, where the gambler aims to guess the last success epoch from past observed data. The player may bet on the event that no further successes occur, or choose a `trap' which is any span of future times. In the…
We provide answers to natural combinatorial questions which arise from learning the rules to Tak. We solve the discarded cases of the $3\times 3$ game not previously considered by Joshua Achiam, showing that Player $1$ has a forced win from…
In the game "Super Six", after successfully getting rid of a stick by rolling with the die a number that is not occupied, the player has the choice to continue to roll the die or to stop and to hand over the die to their opponent. The…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner of the game. Such games are central in formal methods since they model the interaction between a…
"The chance to win given a certain move" is an easily obtainable quantity from data and often quoted in gaming statistics. It is also the fundamental quantity that reinforcement learning AI bases on. Unfortunately, this conditional…
The 2-player impartial game of Wythoff Nim is played on two piles of tokens. A move consists in removing any number of tokens from precisely one of the piles or the same number of tokens from both piles. The winner is the player who removes…
In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…
We study two-player games with alternating moves played on infinite trees. Our main focus is on the case where the trees are full (regular) and the winning set is open (with respect to the product topology on the tree). Gale and Stewart…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers. We use this to create a two-player game. Given a fixed integer $n$ and an initial decomposition of $n = n F_1$, the two…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
We consider games played on finite graphs, whose goal is to obtain a trace belonging to a given set of winning traces. We focus on those states from which Player 1 cannot force a win. We explore and compare several criteria for establishing…
Wythoff's Game is a game for two players playing alternately on two stacks of tiles. On her turn, a player can either remove a positive number of tiles from one stack, or remove an equal positive number of tiles from both stacks. The last…
Recently, Press and Dyson have proposed a new class of probabilistic and conditional strategies for the two-player iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, so-called zero-determinant strategies. A player adopting zero-determinant strategies is able to…
A valuation for a player in a game in extensive form is an assignment of numeric values to the players moves. The valuation reflects the desirability moves. We assume a myopic player, who chooses a move with the highest valuation.…
In this paper we examine problems motivated by on-line financial problems and stochastic games. In particular, we consider a sequence of entirely arbitrary distinct values arriving in random order, and must devise strategies for selecting…
In tug-of-war, two players compete by moving a counter along edges of a graph, each winning the right to move at a given turn according to the flip of a possibly biased coin. The game ends when the counter reaches the boundary, a fixed…