Related papers: Phutball Draws
Motivated by problems in percolation theory, we study the following 2-player positional game. Let $\Lambda_{m \times n}$ be a rectangular grid-graph with $m$ vertices in each row and $n$ vertices in each column. Two players, Maker and…
We propose the study of mathematical ludology, which aims to formally interrogate questions of interest to game studies and game design in particular. The goal is to extend our mathematical understanding of complex games beyond…
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…
We will try to tackle both the theoretical and practical aspects of a very important problem in chess programming as stated in the title of this article - the issue of draw detection by move repetition. The standard approach that has so far…
We present Particle Builder, an online board game which teaches students about concepts from the Standard Model of Particle Physics at a high school level. This short activity resulted in a gain of 0.16, indicating that students learned a…
We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs. Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability $p_{F}$ for the existence of Maker's strategy to claim a member of $F$ in the unbiased game played on…
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…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
In this paper we study the complexity of strategic argumentation for dialogue games. A dialogue game is a 2-player game where the parties play arguments. We show how to model dialogue games in a skeptical, non-monotonic formalism, and we…
We define a variant of the two-dimensional Silver Dollar game. Two coins are placed on a chessboard of unbounded size, and two players take turns choosing one of the coins and moving it. Coins are to be moved to the left or upward…
This paper examines two different variants of the Ludo game, involving multiple dice and a fixed number of total turns. Within each variant, multiple game lengths (total no. of turns) are considered. To compare the two variants, a set of…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
We introduce a two-player game, in which each player extends a given sequence by picking a free element in a domain D of the real line. The aim of the players is to control the parity of the number of transpositions necessary to put the…
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…
This paper considers a game version of the general position problem in which a general position set is built through adversarial play. Two players in a graph, Builder and Blocker, take it in turns to add a vertex to a set, such that the…
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…
Using mostly elementary considerations, we find out who wins the game of Domineering on all rectangular boards of width 2, 3, 5, and 7. We obtain bounds on other boards as well, and prove the existence of polynomial-time strategies for…
Abalone is a 2-player board game with perfect information. The game is played on a 5x5x5 hexagonal grid and ends when a player pushes 6 of their opponents' pieces off the board. Abalone is similar to games like chess and Go in that all…
We initiate the study of a new variant of the Maker-Breaker positional game, which we call multistage game. Given a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}=(\mathcal{X},\mathcal{F})$ and a bias $b \ge 1$, the $(1:b)$ multistage Maker-Breaker game on…
In any periodic direction on the regular pentagon billiard table, there exists two combinatorially different billiard paths, with one longer than the other. For each periodic direction, McMullen asked if one could determine whether the…