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The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
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…
In this work, we consider the problem of minimising the social cost in atomic congestion games. For this problem, we provide tight computational lower bounds along with taxation mechanisms yielding polynomial time algorithms with optimal…
It is well known that a game equilibrium can be far from efficient or fair, due to the misalignment between individual and social objectives. The focus of this paper is to design a new mechanism framework that induces an efficient and fair…
We introduce a method based on the Public Goods Game for solving optimization tasks. In particular, we focus on the Traveling Salesman Problem, i.e. a NP-hard problem whose search space exponentially grows increasing the number of cities.…
In the maximum traveling salesman problem (Max TSP) we are given a complete undirected graph with nonnegative weights on the edges and we wish to compute a traveling salesman tour of maximum weight. We present a fast combinatorial $\frac…
The game of Hangman is a classical asymmetric two player game in which one player, the setter, chooses a secret word from a language, that the other player, the guesser, tries to discover through single letter matching queries, answered by…
In an Avoider-Enforcer game, we are given a hypergraph. Avoider and Enforcer alternate in claiming an unclaimed vertex, until all the vertices of the hypergraph are claimed. Enforcer wins if Avoider claims all vertices of an edge; Avoider…
We present two efficient algorithms that compute the optimal strategy for cop in the game of Cop v.s. Gambler where the gambler's strategy is not optimal but known to the cop. The first algorithm is analogous to Bellman-Ford algorithm for…
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…
We consider geometric instances of the Maximum Weighted Matching Problem (MWMP) and the Maximum Traveling Salesman Problem (MTSP) with up to 3,000,000 vertices. Making use of a geometric duality relationship between MWMP, MTSP, and the…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the game. We study {\em bidding games} in which the players bid for the right to move the token.…
Snake is a classic computer game, which has been around for decades. Based on this game, we study the game of Snake on arbitrary undirected graphs. A snake forms a simple path that has to move to an apple while avoiding colliding with…
I consider the problem of learning an optimal path graphical model from data and show the problem to be NP-hard for the maximum likelihood and minimum description length approaches and a Bayesian approach. This hardness result holds despite…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
In large-scale games, approximating the opponent's strategy space with a small portfolio of representative strategies is a common and powerful technique. However, the construction of these portfolios often relies on domain-specific…
In multistage perfect matching problems we are given a sequence of graphs on the same vertex set and asked to find a sequence of perfect matchings, corresponding to the sequence of graphs, such that consecutive matchings are as similar as…
Two standard algorithms for approximately solving two-player zero-sum concurrent reachability games are value iteration and strategy iteration. We prove upper and lower bounds of 2^(m^(Theta(N))) on the worst case number of iterations…
An heuristic approach to compute strong Nash (Aumann) equilibria is presented. The method is based on differential evolution and three variants of a generative relation for strong Nash equilibria characterization. Numerical experiments…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…