Related papers: Combinatorial games played randomly: Chomp and nim
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…
This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…
The main challenge of combinatorial game theory is to handle combinatorial chaos, if one player knows the strategy better than his opponent, he is able to determine the exact results of a game. If both players are qualified competitor, the…
We study a game where two players take turns selecting points of a convex geometry until the convex closure of the jointly selected points contains all the points of a given winning set. The winner of the game is the last player able to…
Aim: Present a systematic development of part of the theory of combinatorial games from the ground up. Approach: Computational complexity. Combinatorial games are completely determined; the questions of interest are efficiencies of…
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 Richman game is a combinatorial game in which, rather than alternating moves, the two players bid for the privilege of making the next move. We consider both the case where the players pay each other and the case where the players pay a…
In this paper, we will be proving mathematically that scoring play combinatorial game theory covers all combinatorial games. That is, there is a sub-set of scoring play games that are identical to the set of normal play games, and a…
We study variations on combinatorial games in which, instead of alternating moves, the players bid with discrete bidding chips for the right to determine who moves next. We consider both symmetric and partisan games, and explore differences…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…
We study a variation of the combinatorial game of 2-pile Nim. Move as in 2-pile Nim but with the following constraint: Suppose the previous player has just removed say $x>0$ tokens from the shorter pile (either pile in case they have 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 consider an {\em enforce operator} on impartial rulesets similar to the Muller Twist and the comply/constrain operator of Smith and St\u anic\u a, 2002. Applied to the rulesets A and B, on each turn the opponent enforces one of the…
Subtraction games are a classical topic in Combinatorial Game Theory. A result of Golomb~(1966) shows that every subtraction game with a finite move set has an eventually periodic nim-sequence, but the known proof yields only an exponential…
We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and…
Quantitative measures of randomness in games are useful for game design and have implications for gambling law. We treat the outcome of a game as a random variable and derive a closed-form expression and estimator for the variance in the…
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…
We investigate multi-round team competitions between two teams, where each team selects one of its players simultaneously in each round and each player can play at most once. The competition defines an extensive-form game with perfect…
In many social dilemmas, individuals tend to generate a situation with low payoffs instead of a system optimum ("tragedy of the commons"). Is the routing of traffic a similar problem? In order to address this question, we present…