Related papers: The Penults of Tak: Adventures in impartial, norma…
In this paper we will be examining impartial scoring play games. We first give the basic definitions for what impartial scoring play games are and look at their general structure under the disjunctive sum. We will then examine the game of…
We study 2-player impartial games of the form take-away which produce P-positions (second player winning positions) corresponding to complementary Beatty sequences, given by the continued fractions (1;k,1,k,1,...) and (k+1;k,1,k,1,...). Our…
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…
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…
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…
This article concerns the resolution of impartial combinatorial games, and in particular games that can be split in sums of independent positions. We prove that in order to compute the outcome of a sum of independent positions, it is always…
A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…
Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…
We generalize the results and conjectures of Tam\'{a}s Lengyel, showing that the \textsc{nim}-values of a large class of two-dimensional subtraction-transfer games are periodic. These are impartial, normal-play games with two piles of…
We propose a generalization of positional games, supplementing them with a restriction on the order in which the elements of the board are allowed to be claimed. We introduce poset positional games, which are positional games with an…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
Circular Nim is a two-player impartial combinatorial game consisting of $n$ stacks of tokens placed in a circle. A move consists of choosing $k$ consecutive stacks and taking at least one token from one or more of the stacks. The last…
Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) such that a game instance admits a winning…
We introduce and study pawn games, a class of two-player zero-sum turn-based graph games. A turn-based graph game proceeds by placing a token on an initial vertex, and whoever controls the vertex on which the token is located, chooses its…
In many countries poker is one of the most popular card games. Although each variant of poker has its own rules, all involve the use of money to make the challenge meaningful. Nowadays, in the collective consciousness, some variants of…
We introduce the class of pay or play games, which captures scenarios in which each decision maker is faced with a choice between two actions: one with a fixed payoff and an- other with a payoff dependent on others' selected actions. This…
We consider Gillette's two-person zero-sum stochastic games with perfect information. For each $k \in \ZZ_+$ we introduce an effective reward function, called $k$-total. For $k = 0$ and $1$ this function is known as {\it mean payoff} and…
Coloring games are combinatorial games where the players alternate painting uncolored vertices of a graph one of $k > 0$ colors. Each different ruleset specifies that game's coloring constraints. This paper investigates six impartial…
We study two-player games on finite graphs. Turn-based games have many nice properties, but concurrent games are harder to tame: e.g. turn-based stochastic parity games have positional optimal strategies, whereas even basic concurrent…
The traditional mathematical model for an impartial combinatorial game is defined recursively as a set of the options of the game, where the options are games themselves. We propose a model called gamegraph, together with its generalization…