Related papers: Collapsi is strongly solved
In the Colonel Blotto game, which was initially introduced by Borel in 1921, two colonels simultaneously distribute their troops across different battlefields. The winner of each battlefield is determined independently by a winner-take-all…
A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…
We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…
In the original Parrondo game, a single player combines two losing strategies to a winning strategy. In this paper we investigate the question what happens, if two or more players play Parrondo games in a coordinated way. We introduce a…
Cops and Robber is a family of two-player games played on graphs in which one player controls a number of cops and the other player controls a robber. In alternating turns, each player moves (all) their figures. The cops try to capture the…
We study a Stackelberg game to examine how two agents determine to cooperate while competing with each other. Each selects an arrival time to a destination, the earlier one fetching a higher reward. There is, however, an inherent penalty in…
This paper concerns the analysis of the Shapley value in matching games. Matching games constitute a fundamental class of cooperative games which help understand and model auctions and assignments. In a matching game, the value of a…
We bound expected capture time and throttling number for the cop versus gambler game on a connected graph with $n$ vertices, a variant of the cop versus robber game that is played in darkness, where the adversary hops between vertices using…
Penney's game is a two player zero-sum game in which each player chooses a three-flip pattern of heads and tails and the winner is the player whose pattern occurs first in repeated tosses of a fair coin. Because the players choose…
This paper introduced a pursuit and evasion game to be played on a connected graph. One player moves invisibly around the graph, and the other player must guess his position. At each time step the second player guesses a vertex, winning if…
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…
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
We consider a two player simultaneous-move game where the two players each select any permissible $n$-sided die for a fixed integer $n$. A player wins if the outcome of his roll is greater than that of his opponent. Remarkably, for $n>3$,…
We propose the ``Competing Salesmen Problem'' (CSP), a 2-player competitive version of the classical Traveling Salesman Problem. This problem arises when considering two competing salesmen instead of just one. The concern for a shortest…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
This article presents a new three-player version of the bridge playing card game for the purpose of ending fixed partnerships so that the play can be more dynamic and flexible. By dynamically redefining team makeup in real time, this game…
Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…
Online games are dynamic environments where players interact with each other, which offers a rich setting for understanding how players negotiate their way through the game to an ultimate victory. This work studies online player…
In this paper we introduce the novel framework of distributionally robust games. These are multi-player games where each player models the state of nature using a worst-case distribution, also called adversarial distribution. Thus each…
We study a game in which one keeps flipping a coin until a given finite string of heads and tails occurs. We find the expected number of coin flips to end the game when the ending string consists of at most four maximal runs of heads or…