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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 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…
Several different "hat games" have recently received a fair amount of attention. Typically, in a hat game, one or more players are required to correctly guess their hat colour when given some information about other players' hat colours.…
Juggling patterns can be described by a sequence of cards which keep track of the relative order of the balls at each step. This interpretation has many algebraic and combinatorial properties, with connections to Stirling numbers, Dyck…
The ``losing positions" of certain combinatorial games constitute linear error detecting and correcting codes. We show that a large class of games that can be cast in the form of *annihilation games*, provides a potentially polynomial…
The aim of this work is to put together two novel concepts from the theory of integrable billiards: billiard ordered games and confocal billiard books. Billiard books appeared recently in the work of Fomenko's school, in particular of V.…
Independent set games are cooperative games defined on graphs, where players are edges and the value of a coalition is the maximum cardinality of independent sets in the subgraph defined by the coalition. In this paper, we investigate the…
Markov chains are an important example for a course on stochastic processes because simple board games can be used to illustrate the fundamental concepts. For example, a looping board game (like Monopoly) consists of all recurrent states,…
We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…
We introduce a topological combinatorial game called the Link Smoothing Game. The game is played on the shadow of a link diagram and legal moves consist of smoothing precrossings. One player's goal is to keep the diagram connected while the…
Mathematical reasoning with algebraic and graphical representations is essential for success in physics courses. Many problems require students to fluently move between algebraic and graphical representations. We developed a freely…
In this work, we study a triangular variant of the Lights Out game, proposed in the 2025 Capixaba Mathematics Olympiad. We present a combinatorial description of the game, formally characterize its operations, and introduce the notion of a…
Using semi-tensor product of matrices, the structures of several kinds of symmetric games are investigated via the linear representation of symmetric group in the structure vector of games as its representation space. First of all, the…
We fully characterize the core of a broad class of nonlinear games by identifying a suitable relaxation for inherent nonlinearity, directly generalizing the linear frameworks in the literature. This characterization significantly expands…
This paper explores a PAC (probably approximately correct) learning model in cooperative games. Specifically, we are given $m$ random samples of coalitions and their values, taken from some unknown cooperative game; can we predict the…
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…
We introduce the category of optiongraphs and option-preserving maps as a model to study impartial combinatorial games. Outcomes, remoteness, and extended nim-values are preserved under option-preserving maps. We show that the four…
We study a certain family of discrete dynamical processes introduced by Novikoff, Kleinberg and Strogatz that we call flashcard games. We prove a number of results on the evolution of these games, an in particular we settle a conjecture of…
We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…
Financial transactions can be considered edges in a heterogeneous graph between entities sending money and entities receiving money. For financial institutions, such a graph is likely large (with millions or billions of edges) while also…