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Related papers: Avoidance games are PSPACE-Complete

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Very recently, a long-standing open question proposed by Bodlaender in 1991 was answered: the graph coloring game is PSPACE-complete. In 2019, Andres and Lock proposed five variants of the graph coloring game and left open the question of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Thiago Marcilon , Nicolas Martins , Rudini Sampaio

We prove that Strings-and-Coins -- the combinatorial two-player game generalizing the dual of Dots-and-Boxes -- is strongly PSPACE-complete on multigraphs. This result improves the best previous result, NP-hardness, argued in Winning Ways.…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Erik D. Demaine , Jenny Diomidova

This paper studies a multiplayer reach-avoid differential game in the presence of general polygonal obstacles that block the players' motions. The pursuers cooperate to protect a convex region from the evaders who try to reach the region.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-24 Rui Yan , Shuai Mi , Xiaoming Duan , Jintao Chen , Xiangyang Ji

The Maker-Maker convention of positional games is played on a hypergraph whose edges are interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex, aiming at being first to pick all the vertices of some edge.…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Florian Galliot , Jonas Sénizergues

Temporal graphs extend ordinary graphs with discrete time that affects the availability of edges. We consider solving games played on temporal graphs where one player aims to explore the graph, i.e., visit all vertices. The complexity…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Pete Austin , Nicolas Mazzocchi , Sougata Bose , Patrick Totzke

We introduce the Maker-Breaker domination game, a two player game on a graph. At his turn, the first player, Dominator, select a vertex in order to dominate the graph while the other player, Staller, forbids a vertex to Dominator in order…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2018-09-19 Eric Duchêne , Valentin Gledel , Aline Parreau , Gabriel Renault

In this paper, we study three connection games among the most widely played: Havannah, Twixt, and Slither. We show that determining the outcome of an arbitrary input position is PSPACE-complete in all three cases. Our reductions are based…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2016-05-17 Édouard Bonnet , Florian Jamain , Abdallah Saffidine

We note that the remarkable EXPSPACE-hardness result in [G\"oller, Haase, Ouaknine, Worrell, ICALP 2010] ([GHOW10] for short) allows us to answer an open complexity question for simulation preorder of succinct one counter nets (i.e., one…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-01-04 Petr Jancar , Petr Osicka , Zdenek Sawa

We prove PSPACE-hardness for fifteen games in the Super Mario Bros. 2D platforming video game series. Previously, only the original Super Mario Bros. was known to be PSPACE-hard (FUN 2016), though several of the games we study were known to…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-04-17 MIT Hardness Group , Hayashi Ani , Erik D. Demaine , Holden Hall , Matias Korman

We study games with reachability objectives under energy constraints. We first prove that under strict energy constraints (either only lower-bound constraint or interval constraint), those games are LOGSPACE-equivalent to energy games with…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Loïc Hélouët , Nicolas Markey , Ritam Raha

We study routing games where every agent sequentially decides her next edge when she obtains the green light at each vertex. Because every edge only has capacity to let out one agent per round, an edge acts as a FIFO waiting queue that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-10-29 Anisse Ismaili

We classify the computational complexity of the popular video games Portal and Portal 2. We isolate individual mechanics of the game and prove NP-hardness, PSPACE-completeness, or (pseudo)polynomiality depending on the specific game…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2016-12-01 Erik D. Demaine , Joshua Lockhart , Jayson Lynch

Given a c-colored graph G, a vertex of G is happy if it has the same color as all its neighbors. The notion of happy vertices was introduced by Zhang and Li to compute the homophily of a graph. Eto, et al. introduced the Maker-Maker version…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Mathieu Hilaire , Perig Montfort , Nacim Oijid

In this paper, we study the average case complexity of the Unique Games problem. We propose a natural semi-random model, in which a unique game instance is generated in several steps. First an adversary selects a completely satisfiable…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-04-20 Alexandra Kolla , Konstantin Makarychev , Yury Makarychev

We investigate the complexity of finding a winning strategy for the mis\`ere version of three games played on graphs : two variants of the game $\text{NimG}$, introduced by Stockmann in 2004 and the game $\text{Vertex Geography}$ on both…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-05-05 Gabriel Renault , Simon Schmidt

Hive is an abstract strategy game played on a table with hexagonal pieces. First published in 2001, it was and continues to be highly popular among both casual and competitive players. In this paper, we show that for a suitably generalized…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Daniël Andel , Benjamin Rin

This paper studies a variant of multi-player reach-avoid game played between intruders and defenders. The intruder team tries to score by sending as many intruders as possible to the target area, while the defender team tries to minimize…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-05-04 Daigo Shishika , Vijay Kumar

We address the problem of solving parity games with imperfect information on finite graphs of bounded structural complexity. It is a major open problem whether parity games with perfect information can be solved in PTIME. Restricting the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Bernd Puchala , Roman Rabinovich

In the game of $n-Sim$, two players take it in turn to claim unclaimed edges from a complete graph on $n$ vertices, with the first person to create a triangle in his own edges being the loser. We present some strategy-stealing arguments…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-01-29 Alexandru Malekshahian

This work considers a multiplayer reach-avoid game between two adversarial teams in a general convex domain which consists of a target region and a play region. The evasion team, initially lying in the play region, aims to send as many its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-22 Rui Yan , Zongying Shi , Yisheng Zhong