Related papers: Phutball Draws
The game of nim, with its simple rules, its elegant solution and its historical importance is the quintessence of a combinatorial game, which is why it led to so many generalizations and modifications. We present a modification with a new…
Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…
We consider the following combinatorial two-player game: On the random tree arising from a branching process, each round one player (Breaker) deletes an edge and by that removes the descendant and all its progeny, while the other (Maker)…
We introduce and study two Maker-Breaker-like games for constructing planar graphs: the edge drawing game, where two players take turns drawing non-intersecting edges between points in the plane, and the circle packing game, where the…
We define a two-player combinatorial game in which players take alternate turns; each turn consists on deleting a vertex of a graph, together with all the edges containing such vertex. If any vertex became isolated by a player's move then…
We introduce a compact probabilistic model for two-player and two-team (four-player) squash matches, along with a practical skill-comparison rule derived from point-scoring probabilities. Using recorded shot types and court locations, we…
The emergence of mutual cooperation is studied in a spatially extended evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game in which the players are located on the sites of cubic lattices for dimensions d=1, 2, and 3. Each player can choose one of the…
We consider the Maker-Breaker positional game on the vertices of the $n$-dimensional hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$ with $k$-dimensional subcubes as winning sets. We describe a pairing strategy which allows Breaker to win if $n$ is a power of 4 and…
Automatic chess problem or puzzle composition typically involves generating and testing various different positions, sometimes using particular piece sets. Once a position has been generated, it is then usually tested for positional…
We consider quantum variants of Parrondo games on low-dimensional Hilbert spaces. The two games which form the Parrondo game are implemented as quantum walks on a small cycle of length $M$. The dimension of the Hilbert space is $2M$. We…
In this work we analyze an evolutionary game that incorporates the ideas presented by Cipolla in his work \textit{The fundamental laws of human stupidity}. The game considers four strategies, three of them are inherent to the player…
We present tournament results and several powerful strategies for the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma created using reinforcement learning techniques (evolutionary and particle swarm algorithms). These strategies are trained to perform well…
We investigate systematically the impact of human intervention in the training of computer players in a strategy board game. In that game, computer players utilise reinforcement learning with neural networks for evolving their playing…
Notes on the Spinpossible puzzle game. We give a mathematical description of the game, prove some elementary bounds on the length of optimal solutions, and consider variations of the game which place restrictions on the set of permitted…
The 2-player impartial game of Wythoff Nim is played on two piles of tokens. A move consists in removing any number of tokens from precisely one of the piles or the same number of tokens from both piles. The winner is the player who removes…
The crossword-like patterns of tiles in Scrabble form connected graphs of occupied sites on a square lattice. We find the most structureless description that reproduces means and covariances observed in real Scrabble games by adapting a…
The $(m,b)$ Maker-Breaker percolation game on $(\mathbb{Z}^2)_p$, introduced by Day and Falgas-Ravry, is played in the following way. Before the game starts, each edge of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ is removed independently with probability $1-p$. After…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…
The game of Go has a long history in East Asian countries, but the field of Computer Go has yet to catch up to humans until the past couple of years. While the rules of Go are simple, the strategy and combinatorics of the game are immensely…