Related papers: Hive is PSPACE-Hard
The Reward-Penalty-Selection Problem (RPSP) can be seen as a combination of the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and the Hitting Set Problem (HSP). Given a set of elements, a set of reward sets, and a set of penalty sets, one tries to find a subset…
Mastermind is a popular board game released in 1971, where a codemaker chooses a secret pattern of colored pegs, and a codebreaker has to guess it in several trials. After each attempt, the codebreaker gets a response from the codemaker…
This report presents Giraffe, a chess engine that uses self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge, with minimal hand-crafted knowledge given by the programmer. Unlike previous attempts using machine learning only to perform…
2023 undergraduate thesis on a deterministic "hat game." For a digraph $D$, each player stands on a vertex $v$, is assigned a hat from $h(v)$ possible colors, and makes $g(v)$ guesses of her hat's color based on her out-neighbors' hats. If…
This thesis presents some geometric insights into three different types of two player prediction games -- namely general learning task, prediction with expert advice, and online convex optimization. These games differ in the nature of the…
Consider the following two-player game on the edges of $K_n$, the complete graph with $n$ vertices: Starting with an empty graph $G$ on the vertex set of $K_n$, in each round the first player chooses $b \in \mathbb{N}$ edges from $K_n$…
Go gaming is a struggle between adversaries, black and white simple stones, and aim to control the most Go board territory for success. Rules are simple but Go game fighting is highly intricate. Stones placement and interaction on board is…
We consider the cops and robber game variant consisting of one cop and one robber on time-varying graphs (TVG). The considered TVGs are edge periodic graphs, i.e., for each edge, a binary string $s_e$ determines in which time step the edge…
We study two positional games played on hypergraphs, whose edges may be interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex of the hypergraph. We say a player fills an edge if that player has picked all…
Correlated equilibria -- and their generalization $\Phi$-equilibria -- are a fundamental object of study in game theory, offering a more tractable alternative to Nash equilibria in multi-player settings. While computational aspects of…
Quixo is a two-player game played on a 5$\times$5 grid where the players try to align five identical symbols. Specifics of the game require the usage of novel techniques. Using a combination of value iteration and backward induction, we…
The game of rendezvous with adversaries is a game on a graph played by two players: Facilitator and Divider. Facilitator has two agents and Divider has a team of $k \ge 1$ agents. While the initial positions of Facilitator's agents are…
We study the computational complexity of an important property of simple, regular and weighted games, which is decisiveness. We show that this concept can naturally be represented in the context of hypergraph theory, and that decisiveness…
In cooperative game theory, associated games allow for providing meaningful characterizations of solution concepts. Moreover, generalized values allow computing an influence or power index of each coalition in a game. In this paper, we view…
Aim: Present a systematic development of part of the theory of combinatorial games from the ground up. Approach: Computational complexity. Combinatorial games are completely determined; the questions of interest are efficiencies of…
This paper suggests a forward-pruning technique for computer chess that uses 'Move Tables', which are like Transposition Tables, but for moves not positions. They use an efficient memory structure and has put the design into the context of…
In this paper we study the computational complexity of the game of Scrabble. We prove the PSPACE-completeness of a derandomized model of the game, answering an open question of Erik Demaine and Robert Hearn.
Let $(X, \mathcal{F})$ be a hypergraph. The Maker-Breaker game on $(X, \mathcal{F})$ is a combinatorial game between two players, Maker and Breaker. Beginning with Maker, the players take turns claiming vertices from $X$ that have not yet…
We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…
From the early days of computing, games have been important testbeds for studying how well machines can do sophisticated decision making. In recent years, machine learning has made dramatic advances with artificial agents reaching…