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Related papers: Avoidance games are PSPACE-Complete

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We prove PSPACE-completeness of the well-studied pushing-block puzzle Push-1F, a theoretical abstraction of many video games (introduced in 1999). The proof also extends to Push-$k$ for any $k \ge 2$. We also prove PSPACE-completeness of…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Hayashi Ani , Lily Chung , Erik D. Demaine , Jenny Diomidova , Della Hendrickson , Jayson Lynch

A multiplayer reach-avoid game is a differential game between an attacking team with NA attackers and a defending team with ND defenders playing on a compact domain with obstacles. The attacking team aims to send M of the NA attackers to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-11-03 Mo Chen , Zhengyuan Zhou , Claire J. Tomlin

We consider the complexity properties of modern puzzle games, Hexiom, Cut the Rope and Back to Bed. The complexity of games plays an important role in the type of experience they provide to players. Back to Bed is shown to be PSPACE-Hard…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-05-22 Diogo M. Costa , Alexandre P. Francisco , Luís M. S. Russo

We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-12-15 R. Teal Witter

We study multiplayer quantitative reachability games played on a finite directed graph, where the objective of each player is to reach his target set of vertices as quickly as possible. Instead of the well-known notion of Nash equilibrium…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Thomas Brihaye , Véronique Bruyère , Aline Goeminne , Jean-François Raskin , Marie van den Bogaard

We study F-saturation games, first introduced by F\"uredi, Reimer and Seress in 1991, and named as such by West. The main question is to determine the length of the game whilst avoiding various classes of graph, playing on a large complete…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-06-06 Jonathan D. Lee , Ago-Erik Riet

Exactly 20 years ago at MFCS, Demaine posed the open problem whether the game of Dots & Boxes is PSPACE-complete. Dots & Boxes has been studied extensively, with for instance a chapter in Berlekamp et al. "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Kevin Buchin , Mart Hagedoorn , Irina Kostitsyna , Max van Mulken

We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Jeffrey Bosboom , Spencer Congero , Erik D. Demaine , Martin L. Demaine , Jayson Lynch

We study \emph{partial-information} two-player turn-based games on graphs with omega-regular objectives, when the partial-information player has \emph{limited memory}. Such games are a natural formalization for reactive synthesis when the…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Dhananjay Raju , Rüdiger Ehlers , Ufuk Topcu

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2013-08-07 Josef Cibulka , Jan Kynčl , Viola Mészáros , Rudolf Stolař , Pavel Valtr

We introduce a new type of positional games, played on a vertex set of a graph. Given a graph $G$, two players claim vertices of $G$, where the outcome of the game is determined by the subgraphs of $G$ induced by the vertices claimed by…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-01-03 Gal Kronenberg , Adva Mond , Alon Naor

We introduce the rendezvous game with adversaries. In this game, two players, {\sl Facilitator} and {\sl Disruptor}, play against each other on a graph. Facilitator has two agents, and Disruptor has a team of $k$ agents located in some…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2021-03-12 Fedor V. Fomin , Petr A. Golovach , Dimitrios M. Thilikos

We study the biased $(2:b)$ Walker--Breaker games, played on the edge set of the complete graph on $n$ vertices, $K_n$. These games are a variant of the Maker--Breaker games with the restriction that Walker (playing the role of Maker) has…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-06-22 Jovana Forcan , Mirjana Mikalački

We present two zero-sum games modeling situations where one player attacks (or hides in) a finite dimensional nonempty compact set, and the other tries to prevent the attack (or find him). The first game, called patrolling game, corresponds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-03 Tristan Garrec

We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2014-08-28 Rahul Mehta

The physics-based simulation game Angry Birds has been heavily researched by the AI community over the past five years, and has been the subject of a popular AI competition that is currently held annually as part of a leading AI conference.…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-01-17 Matthew Stephenson , Jochen Renz , Xiaoyu Ge

Combinatorial games played between two players, called Spoiler and Duplicator, have often been used to capture syntactic properties of formal logical languages. For instance, the widely used Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e (EF) game captures the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Ronald Fagin , Neil Immerman , Phokion Kolaitis , Jonathan Lenchner , Rik Sengupta

By resorting to the vector space structure of finite games, skew-symmetric games (SSGs) are proposed and investigated as a natural subspace of finite games. First of all, for two player games, it is shown that the skew-symmetric games form…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-12-11 Yaqi Hao , Daizhan Cheng

The class of Guaranteed Scoring Games (GS) are two-player combinatorial games with the property that Normal-play games (Conway et. al.) are ordered embedded into GS. They include, as subclasses, the scoring games considered by Milnor…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-06-01 Urban Larsson , João P. Neto , Richard J. Nowakowski , Carlos P. Santos

Surveillance-Evasion (SE) games form an important class of adversarial trajectory-planning problems. We consider time-dependent SE games, in which an Evader is trying to reach its target while minimizing the cumulative exposure to a moving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Elliot Cartee , Lexiao Lai , Qianli Song , Alexander Vladimirsky