Related papers: Winning Lights Out with Fibonacci

Parrondo's paradox is about a paradoxical game and gambling where two probabilistic losing games can be combined to form a winning game. While the counter intuitive game is interesting in itself, it can be thought of a discrete version of…

Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…

N players are randomly fitted with a colored hat (q different colors). All players guess simultaneously the color of their own hat observing only the hat colors of the other N-1 players. The team wins if all players guess right. No…

Some distinguished types of voters, as vetoers, passers or nulls, as well as some others, play a significant role in voting systems because they are either the most powerful or the least powerful voters in the game independently of the…

Motivated by the burning and cooling processes, the burning game is introduced. The game is played on a graph $G$ by the two players (Burner and Staller) that take turns selecting vertices of $G$ to burn; as in the burning process, burning…

This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…

Connect Four is a two-player game where each player attempts to be the first to create a sequence of four of their pieces, arranged horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, by dropping pieces into the columns of a grid of width seven and…

A configuration of the lit-only $\sigma$-game on a graph $\Gamma$ is an assignment of one of two states, {\it on} or {\it off}, to each vertex of $\Gamma.$ Given a configuration, a move of the lit-only $\sigma$-game on $\Gamma$ allows the…

The usual $n$-in-a-row game is a positional game in which two player alternately claim points in $\bb{Z}^2$ with the winner being the first player to claim $n$ consecutive points in a line. We consider a variant of the game, suggested by…

Reachability games are two-player games played on a graph, where the objective of $\texttt{REACH}$ player is to reach the target set whereas the objective of $\texttt{SAFE}$ player is to stay away from the target set. Reachability games…

An algorithm based on backward induction is devised in order to compute the optimal sequence of games to be played in Parrondo games. The algorithm can be used to find the optimal sequence for any finite number of turns or in the steady…

Chopsticks is a game played by two players where they start with one finger raised on each hand. On their turn, each player moves by pointing an attacking hand at one of their opponent's hands. The number of fingers on the pointed hand…

Energy parity games are infinite two-player turn-based games played on weighted graphs. The objective of the game combines a (qualitative) parity condition with the (quantitative) requirement that the sum of the weights (i.e., the level of…

Consider a game played on a simple graph $G = (V,E)$ where each vertex consists of a clickable light. Clicking any vertex $v$ toggles the on/off state of $v$ and its neighbors. One wins the game by finding a sequence of clicks that turns…

Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers. We use this decomposition to construct a two-player game. Given a fixed integer $n$ and an initial decomposition of $n=n…

We continue our studies of burn-off chip-firing games from [Discrete Math. Theor. Comput. Sci. 15 (2013), no. 1, 121-132; MR3040546] and [Australas. J. Combin. 68 (2017), no. 3, 330-345; MR3656659]. The latter article introduced randomness…

While discounted payoff games and classic games that reduce to them, like parity and mean-payoff games, are symmetric, their solutions are not. We have taken a fresh view on the properties that optimal solutions need to have, and devised a…

We consider surveillance-evasion differential games, where a pursuer must try to constantly maintain visibility of a moving evader. The pursuer loses as soon as the evader becomes occluded. Optimal controls for game can be formulated as a…

At some places (see the references) Martin Erickson describes a certain game: "Two players alternately write O's (first player) and X's (second player) in the unoccupied cells of an n x n grid. The first player (if any) to occupy four cells…

A wide variety of goals could cause an AI to disable its off switch because "you can't fetch the coffee if you're dead" (Russell 2019). Prior theoretical work on this shutdown problem assumes that humans know everything that AIs do. In…