Related papers: Indecomposable combinatorial games
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…
Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. One of the major approaches to analyzing games in combinatorial game theory is to break down a given game position into a disjunctive sum of multiple…
In this paper, we address a natural question at the intersection of combinatorial game theory and computational complexity: "Can a sum of simple tepid games in canonical form be intractable?" To resolve this fundamental question, we…
In this paper we will discuss scoring play games. We will give the basic definitions for scoring play games, and show that they form a well defined set, with clear and distinct outcome classes under these definitions. We will also show that…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…
We show that a cooperative game may be decomposed into a sum of component games, one for each player, using the combinatorial Hodge decomposition on a graph. This decomposition is shown to satisfy certain efficiency, null-player, symmetry,…
We examine short combinatorial games for three or more players under a new play convention in which a player who cannot move on their turn is the unique loser. We show that many theorems of impartial and partizan two-player games under…
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…
This paper provides sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions for two-person zero-sum games with inf/sup-compact payoff functions and with possibly noncompact decision sets for both players. Payoff functions may be unbounded, and…
This paper provides a decomposition technique for the purpose of simplifying the solution of certain zero-sum differential games. The games considered terminate when the state reaches a target, which can be expressed as the union of a…
Absolute combinatorial game theory was recently developed as a unifying tool for constructive/local game comparison (Larsson et al. 2018). The theory concerns {\em parental universes} of combinatorial games; standard closure properties are…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
This article concerns the resolution of impartial combinatorial games, and in particular games that can be split in sums of independent positions. We prove that in order to compute the outcome of a sum of independent positions, it is always…
We present a definition for the sum of a sequence of combinatorial games. This sum coincides with the classical sum in the case of a converging sequence of real numbers and with the infinitary natural sum in the case of a sequence of…
Combinatorial Scoring games, with the property `extra pass moves for a player does no harm', are characterized. The characterization involves an order embedding of Conway's Normal-play games. Also, we give a theorem for comparing games with…
We consider the class of "well-tempered" integer-valued scoring games, which have the property that the parity of the length of the game is independent of the line of play. We consider disjunctive sums of these games, and develop a theory…
Combinatorial Game Theory typically studies sequential rulesets with perfect information where two players alternate moves. There are rulesets with {\em entailing moves} that break the alternating play axiom and/or restrict the other…
We introduce several methods of decomposition for two player normal form games. Viewing the set of all games as a vector space, we exhibit explicit orthonormal bases for the subspaces of potential games, zero-sum games, and their orthogonal…
The representation of any integer as the sum of two cubes to a fixed modulus is always possible if and only if the modulus is not divisible by seven or nine. For a positive non-prime integer N there is given an inductive way to find its…