Related papers: So Long Sucker: Endgame Analysis

We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire played on a computer. Two popular board shapes are the 33-hole cross-shaped board, and the 15-hole triangle board---we use them as examples throughout. The basic game begins from a full board…

The \emph{slow-coloring game} is played by Lister and Painter on a graph $G$. Initially, all vertices of $G$ are uncolored. In each round, Lister marks a nonempty set $M$ of uncolored vertices, and Painter colors a subset of $M$ that is…

Simple board games, like Tic-Tac-Toe and CONNECT-4, play an important role not only in the development of mathematical and logical skills, but also in the emotional and social development. In this paper, we address the problem of generating…

We consider turn-based stochastic two-player games with a combination of a parity condition that must hold surely, that is in all possible outcomes, and of a parity condition that must hold almost-surely, that is with probability 1. The…

This paper studies two-player zero-sum games played on graphs and makes contributions toward the following question: given an objective, how much memory is required to play optimally for that objective? We study regular objectives, where…

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,…

In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…

We study a model of games that combines concurrency, imperfect information and stochastic aspects. Those are finite states games in which, at each round, the two players choose, simultaneously and independently, an action. Then a successor…

We consider two-player stochastic games played on a finite graph for infinitely many rounds. Stochastic games generalize both Markov decision processes (MDP) by adding an adversary player, and two-player deterministic games by adding…

This paper studies Ebert's hat problem with four players and two colors, where the probabilities of the colors may be different for each player. Our goal is to maximize the probability of winning the game and to describe winning strategies…

Subset take-away is a two-player game involving a fixed finite set A. Players alternate choosing a proper, non-empty subset of A, with the condition that one may not name a set containing a set that was named earlier. A player unable to…

Player ONE chooses a meager set and player TWO, a nowhere dense set per inning. They play $\omega$ many innings. ONE's consecutive choices must form a (weakly) increasing sequence. TWO wins if the union of the chosen nowhere dense sets…

Circular nim $CN(m, k)$ is a variant of nim, in which there are $m$ piles of tokens arranged in a circle and each player, in their turn, chooses at most $k$ consecutive piles in the circle and removes an arbitrary number of tokens from each…

We analyze the puzzle video game This Game Is Not Going To Load Itself, where the player routes data packets of three different colors from given sources to given sinks of the correct color. Given the sources, sinks, and some previously…

Snackjack is a highly simplified version of blackjack that was proposed by Ethier (2010) and given its name by Epstein (2013). The eight-card deck comprises two aces, two deuces, and four treys, with aces having value either 1 or 4, and…

This paper studies two-player zero-sum repeated Bayesian games in which every player has a private type that is unknown to the other player, and the initial probability of the type of every player is publicly known. The types of players are…

We consider the Maker-Breaker positional game on the vertices of the $n$-dimensional hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$ with $k$-dimensional subcubes as winning sets. We describe a pairing strategy which allows Breaker to win if $n$ is a power of 4 and…

We propose a definition of generalized Cops and Robbers games where there are two players, the Pursuer and the Evader, who each move via prescribed rules. If the Pursuer can ensure that the game enters into a fixed set of final positions,…

Consider the following game between a random player R and a deterministic player D. There is a pile of n elements at the beginning. The rules for playing are as follows: In each turn of R, if the pile contains exactly m elements, R removes…

In this paper we experiment with a 2-player strategy board game where playing models are evolved using reinforcement learning and neural networks. The models are evolved to speed up automatic game development based on human involvement at…