Related papers: Turning Tiles is PSPACE-complete
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…
We propose a unifying additive theory for standard conventions in Combinatorial Game Theory, including normal-, mis\`ere- and scoring-play, studied by Berlekamp, Conway, Dorbec, Ettinger, Guy, Larsson, Milley, Neto, Nowakowski, Renault,…
Temporal graphs extend ordinary graphs with discrete time that affects the availability of edges. We consider solving games played on temporal graphs where one player aims to explore the graph, i.e., visit all vertices. The complexity…
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…
A valuation for a player in a game in extensive form is an assignment of numeric values to the players moves. The valuation reflects the desirability moves. We assume a myopic player, who chooses a move with the highest valuation.…
We show that two-dimensional billiard systems are Turing complete, in the sense that the halting of any Turing machine with a given input is equivalent to a certain bounded trajectory in this system entering a specified open set. Billiards…
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…
Important decisions are likely made by groups of agents. Thus group decision making is very common in practice. Very transparent group aggregating rules are given by weighted voting, where each agent is assigned a weight. Here a proposal is…
The focus of this essay is a rigorous treatment of infinite games. An infinite game is defined as a play consisting of a fixed number of players whose sequence of moves is repeated, or iterated ad infinitum. Each sequence corresponds to a…
We study zero-sum games, a variant of the classical combinatorial Subtraction games (studied for example in the monumental work "Winning Ways", by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy), called Cumulative Subtraction (CS). Two players alternate in…
We settle two long-standing complexity-theoretical questions-open since 1981 and 1993-in combinatorial game theory (CGT). We prove that the Grundy value (a.k.a. nim-value, or nimber) of Undirected Geography is PSPACE-complete to compute.…
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…
Burke and Teng introduced a two-player combinatorial game Atropos based on Sperner's lemma, and showed that deciding whether one has a winning strategy for Atropos is PSPACE-complete. In the original Atropos game, the players must color a…
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…
This paper addresses several significant gaps in the theory of restricted mis\`ere play (Plambeck, Siegel 2008), primarily in the well-studied universe of dead-ending games, $\mathcal{E}$ (Milley, Renault 2013); if a player run out of moves…
We analyze the computational complexity of the video game "CELESTE" and prove that solving a generalized level in it is NP-Complete. Further, we also show how, upon introducing a small change in the game mechanics (adding a new game…
Imitation is simple behavior which uses successful actions of others in order to deal with one's own problems. Because success of imitation generally depends on whether profit of an imitating agent coincides with those of other agents or…
We study the combinatorial two-player game Tron. We answer the extremal question on general graphs and also consider smaller graph classes. Bodlaender and Kloks conjectured in [2] PSPACE- completeness. We proof this conjecture.
Compositional Game Theory is a new, recently introduced model of economic games based upon the computer science idea of compositionality. In it, complex and irregular games can be built up from smaller and simpler games, and the equilibria…