Related papers: Counting Nonattacking Chess Piece Placements: Bish…
When solving k-in-a-Row games, the Hales-Jewett pairing strategy [4] is a well-known strategy to prove that specific positions are (at most) a draw. It requires two empty squares per possible winning line (group) to be marked, i.e., with a…
We study the classical game of peg solitaire when diagonal jumps are allowed. We prove that on many boards, one can begin from a full board with one peg missing, and finish with one peg anywhere on the board. We then consider the problem of…
Certain mathematical structures make a habit of reoccuring in the most diverse list of settings. Some obvious examples exhibiting this intrusive type of behavior include the Fibonacci numbers, the Catalan numbers, the quaternions, and the…
This paper investigates the geometrical properties of real world games (e.g. Tic-Tac-Toe, Go, StarCraft II). We hypothesise that their geometrical structure resemble a spinning top, with the upright axis representing transitive strength,…
We introduce a family of univariate polynomials indexed by integer partitions. At prime powers, they count the number of subspaces in a finite vector space that transform under a regular diagonal matrix in a specified manner. This…
For piecewise-linear maps the stable and unstable manifolds of hyperbolic periodic solutions are themselves piecewise-linear. Hence compact subsets of these manifolds can be represented using polytopes (i.e. polygons, in the case of…
We use the Chebyshev knot diagram model of Koseleff and Pecker in order to introduce a random knot diagram model by assigning the crossings to be positive or negative uniformly at random. We give a formula for the probability of choosing a…
Given a set of alternatives to be ranked, and some pairwise comparison data, ranking is a least squares computation on a graph. The vertices are the alternatives, and the edge values comprise the comparison data. The basic idea is very…
We introduce an analog to the notion of Polish space for spaces of weight $\leq\kappa$, where $\kappa$ is an uncountable regular cardinal such that $\kappa^{<\kappa}=\kappa$. Specifically, we consider spaces in which player II has a winning…
We investigate the $k$-cycle shuffle on repeated cards, namely on a deck consisting of $l$ identical copies of each of $m$ card types, with total size $n=ml$. We establish asymptotic results for the total variation mixing of this shuffle,…
The classic Rock-Paper-Scissors game of size 3 and its extension, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, are modeled by directed graphs called tournaments. They can be further extended to any odd size. The extended games are regular tournaments…
Many polynomial invariants are defined on graphs for encoding the combinatorial information and researching them algebraically. In this paper, we introduce the cycle polynomial and the path polynomial of directed graphs for counting cycles…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm that always finds an (approximate) Nash equilibrium for repeated two-player stochastic games. The algorithm exploits the folk theorem to derive a strategy profile that forms an equilibrium by…
We introduce and study Minkowski games. These are two player games, where the players take turns to chose positions in $\mathbb{R}^d$ based on some rules. Variants include boundedness games, where one player wants to keep the positions…
We prove that two pushing-blocks puzzles are intractable in 2D. One of our constructions improves an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99] for a puzzle inspired by the game PushPush. The second construction answers a…
The Knight's Tour problem consists of finding a Hamiltonian path for the knight on a given set of points so that the knight can visit exactly once every vertex of the mentioned set. In the present paper, we provide a $5$-dimensional…
We consider two games between two players Ann and Ben who build a word together by adding alternatively a letter at the end of the shared word. In the nonrepetitive game, Ben wins the game if he can create a square of length at least $4$,…
In view of classical results of Masur and Veech almost every element in the moduli space of compact translation surfaces is recurrent. In this paper we focus on the problem of recurrence for elements of smooth curves in the moduli space. We…
We consider new types of perfect shuffles wherein a deck is split in half, one half of the deck is "reversed", and then the cards are interlaced. Flip shuffles are when the reversal comes from flipping the half over so that we also need to…
Colonel Blotto games with discrete strategy spaces effectively illustrate the intricate nature of multidimensional strategic reasoning. This paper studies the equilibrium set of such games where, in line with prior experimental work, the…