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An abstraction of normal form games is proposed, called Feasibility/Desirability Games (or FD Games in short). FD Games can be seen from three points of view: as a new presentation of games in which Nash equilibria can be found, as choice…
Combinatorial games are widely used in finite model theory, constraint satisfaction, modal logic and concurrency theory to characterize logical equivalences between structures. In particular, Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games, pebble games, and…
We begin by reviewing and proving the basic facts of combinatorial game theory. We then consider scoring games (also known as Milnor games or positional games), focusing on the "fixed-length" games for which all sequences of play terminate…
Simulation relations are an important tool in automata theory because they provide efficiently computable approximations to language inclusion. In recent years, extensions of ordinary simulations have been studied, for instance multi-pebble…
We introduce a new family of Parrondo's games of alternating losing strategies in order to get a winning result. In our version of the games we consider an ensemble of players and use "social" rules in which the probabilities of the games…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of all but one problem in a large space of pulling-block problems where the goal is for the agent to reach a target destination. The problems are parameterized by whether pulling is optional, the number of…
In the "Game about Squares" the task is to push unit squares on an integer lattice onto corresponding dots. A square can only be moved into one given direction. When a square is pushed onto a lattice point with an arrow the direction of the…
The Taxman game has proven to be hard to solve optimally, so efforts have been made to find heuristic strategies that do well in practice. We present results on the NP-hardness of a variant of the game via an equivalence to a particular…
We investigate the complexity of the platform video game Celeste. We prove that navigating Celeste is PSPACE-hard in five different ways, corresponding to different subsets of the game mechanics. In particular, we prove the game PSPACE-hard…
Positional games are a branch of combinatorics, researching a variety of two-player games, ranging from popular recreational games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Hex, to purely abstract games played on graphs and hypergraphs. It is closely…
We extend the inflationary fixed-point logic, IFP, with a new kind of second-order quantifiers which have (poly-)logarithmic bounds. We prove that on ordered structures the new logic $\exists^{\log^{\omega}}\text{IFP}$ captures the limited…
We initiate the study of simple games from the point of view of combinatorial topology. The starting premise is that the losing coalitions of a simple game can be identified with a simplicial complex. Various topological constructions and…
Fictitious play with reinforcement learning is a general and effective framework for zero-sum games. However, using the current deep neural network models, the implementation of fictitious play faces crucial challenges. Neural network model…
Many puzzle video games, like Sokoban, involve moving some agent in a maze. The reachable locations are usually apparent for a human player, and the difficulty of the game is mainly related to performing actions on objects, such as pushing…
Weighted voting games are ubiquitous mathematical models which are used in economics, political science, neuroscience, threshold logic, reliability theory and distributed systems. They model situations where agents with variable voting…
We study so-called invariant games played with a fixed number $d$ of heaps of matches. A game is described by a finite list $\mathcal{M}$ of integer vectors of length $d$ specifying the legal moves. A move consists in changing the current…
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…
Pavlov, a well-known strategy in game theory, has been shown to have some advantages in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) game. However, this strategy can be exploited by inveterate defectors. We modify this strategy to mitigate the…
We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…
In reinforcement learning (RL), the term self-play describes a kind of multi-agent learning (MAL) that deploys an algorithm against copies of itself to test compatibility in various stochastic environments. As is typical in MAL, the…