Related papers: Phutball Draws
This brief paper describes the single-player card game called "Perpetual Motion" and reports on a computational analysis of the game's outcome. The analysis follows a Monte Carlo methodology based on a sample of 10,000 randomly generated…
We use replicator dynamics to study an iterated prisoners' dilemma game with memory. In this study, we investigate the characteristics of all 32 possible strategies with a single-step memory by observing the results when each strategy…
In this work, we investigate Maker-Breaker directed triangle games, a directionally constrained variant of the classical Maker-Breaker triangle game. Our board of interest is a tournament, and the winning sets are all $3$-cycles present in…
We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 2D, improving an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99]. The puzzle, inspired by the game *PushPush*, consists of unit square blocks on an integer…
This paper is inspired by the PQ penny flip game. It employs group-theoretic concepts to study the original game and also its possible extensions. We show that the PQ penny flip game can be associated with the dihedral group $D_{8}$. We…
In this paper we are interested in the motion of a ball inside a billiard table bounded by a particular smooth curve. This table belongs to a family of billiards which can all be drawn by a common process: the so-called gardener's string…
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…
We consider the problem of obtaining sparse positional strategies for safety games. Such games are a commonly used model in many formal methods, as they make the interaction of a system with its environment explicit. Often, a winning…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…
We develop a theory of combinatorial games that is appropriate for describing positions in Hex and other monotone set coloring games. We consider two natural conditions on such games: a game is monotone if all moves available to both…
We examine the complexity of the ``Texas Hold'em'' variant of poker from a topological perspective. We show that there exists a natural simplicial complex governing the multi-way winning probabilities between various hands, and that this…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
This paper has a twofold scope. The first one is to clarify and put in evidence the isomorphic character of two theories developed in quite different fields: on one side, threshold logic, on the other side, simple games. One of the main…
In this paper, we consider a game beginning with a multiset of elements from a group. On a move, two elements are replaced by their sum. This is a no strategy game, and can be modeled as a graded poset with the rank of a node equal to the…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…
Maker-Breaker games are played on a hypergraph $(X,\mathcal{F})$, where $\mathcal{F} \subseteq 2^X$ denotes the family of winning sets. Both players alternately claim a predefined amount of edges (called bias) from the board $X$, and Maker…
A general position set of a graph $G$ is a set of vertices $S$ in $G$ such that no three vertices from $S$ lie on a common shortest path. In this paper we introduce and study the general position achievement game. The game is played on a…
On the blockchain, NFT games have risen in popularity, spawning new types of digital assets. We present a simplified version of well-known NFT games, followed by a discussion of issues influencing the structure and stability of generic…
We construct a Parrondo's game using discrete time quantum walks. Two lossing games are represented by two different coin operators. By mixing the two coin operators $U_{A}(\alpha_{A},\beta_{A},\gamma_{A})$ and…