Related papers: Combinatorial games played randomly: Chomp and nim
The theory of combinatorial game (like board games) and the theory of social games (where one looks for Nash equilibria) are normally considered as two separate theories. Here we shall see what comes out of combining the ideas. The central…
We play a variation of Nim on stacks of tokens. Take your favorite increasing sequence of positive integers and color the tokens according to the following rule. Each token on a level that corresponds to a number in the sequence is colored…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
Game theory provides a mathematical framework for analysing strategic situations involving at least two players. Normal-form games model situations where the players simultaneously pick their moves. In this thesis we explore the strategic…
A new combinatorial game is given. It generalizes both Substraction and Nim. It is proved the computation of Nash equilibrium points in this new game is NP-hard.
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…
We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…
We consider two-player zero-sum games on graphs. These games can be classified on the basis of the information of the players and on the mode of interaction between them. On the basis of information the classification is as follows: (a)…
Let A be a finite subset of the naturals and let n be a natural. Let NIM(A;n) be the two player game in which players alternate removing $a\in A$ stones from a pile with $n$ stones; the first player who cannot move loses. This game has been…
Fibonacci nim is a popular impartial combinatorial game, usually played with a single pile of stones. The game is appealing due to its surprising connections with the Fibonacci numbers and the Zeckendorf representation. In this article, we…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
We recall a combinatorial derivation of the functions generating probability of winnings for each of many participants of the Penney's game and show a generalization of the Conway's formula to this case.
This thesis will be discussing scoring play combinatorial games and looking at the general structure of these games under different operators. I will also be looking at the Sprague-Grundy values for scoring play impartial games, and…
In the original Parrondo game, a single player combines two losing strategies to a winning strategy. In this paper we investigate the question what happens, if two or more players play Parrondo games in a coordinated way. We introduce a…
Two losing gambling games, when alternated in a periodic or random fashion, can produce a winning game. This paradox has been inspired by certain physical systems capable of rectifying fluctuations: the so-called Brownian ratchets. In this…
In this paper, we consider combinatorial game rulesets based on data structures normally covered in an undergraduate Computer Science Data Structures course: arrays, stacks, queues, priority queues, sets, linked lists, and binary trees. We…
Notes on the Spinpossible puzzle game. We give a mathematical description of the game, prove some elementary bounds on the length of optimal solutions, and consider variations of the game which place restrictions on the set of permitted…
Stochastic games combine controllable and adversarial non-determinism with stochastic behavior and are a common tool in control, verification and synthesis of reactive systems facing uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic games are natural…
We construct a combinatorial function F which computes the number of oriented Hamiltonian paths of any given type, in a transitive tournament. We also study many properties of F that arise, and reach some observations.
In 1901, Bouton proved that a winning strategy of the game of Nim is given by the bitwise XOR, called the nim-sum. But, why does such a weird binary operation work? Led by this question, this paper introduces a categorical reinterpretation…