Related papers: Collapsi is strongly solved
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…
In the context of competitive multiplayer games, collusion happens when two or more teams decide to collaborate towards a common goal, with the intention of gaining an unfair advantage from this cooperation. The task of identifying…
To learn good joint policies for multi-agent collaboration with imperfect information remains a fundamental challenge. While for two-player zero-sum games, coordinate-ascent approaches (optimizing one agent's policy at a time, e.g.,…
We introduce a novel metric to quantify the fragility of chess positions using the interaction graph of pieces. This fragility score $F$ captures the tension within a position and serves as a strong indicator of tipping points in a game. In…
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…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
Cops and Robbers games have been studied for the last few decades in computer science and mathematics. As in general pursuit evasion games, pursuers (cops) seek to capture evaders (robbers); however, players move in turn and are constrained…
In trick-taking card games, a two-step process of state sampling and evaluation is widely used to approximate move values. While the evaluation component is vital, the accuracy of move value estimates is also fundamentally linked to how…
Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
State-of-the-art methods for solving 2-player zero-sum imperfect information games rely on linear programming or regret minimization, though not on dynamic programming (DP) or heuristic search (HS), while the latter are often at the core of…
The solution to a Nash or a nonsymmetric bargaining game is obtained by maximizing a concave function over a convex set, i.e., it is the solution to a convex program. We show that each 2-player game whose convex program has linear…
We study the convergence time of the best response dynamics in player-specific singleton congestion games. It is well known that this dynamics can cycle, although from every state a short sequence of best responses to a Nash equilibrium…
We use a recently discovered constrained de Finetti reduction (aka "Post-Selection Lemma") to study the parallel repetition of multi-player non-local games under no-signalling strategies. Since the technique allows us to reduce general…
We extend the formalism of Conjectural Variations games to Stackelberg games involving multiple leaders and a single follower. To solve these nonconvex games, a common assumption is that the leaders compute their strategies having perfect…
In the compulsive gambler process there is a finite set of agents who meet pairwise at random times ($i$ and $j$ meet at times of a rate-$\nu_{ij}$ Poisson process) and, upon meeting, play an instantaneous fair game in which one wins the…
In this paper, we settle the sampling complexity of solving discounted two-player turn-based zero-sum stochastic games up to polylogarithmic factors. Given a stochastic game with discount factor $\gamma\in(0,1)$ we provide an algorithm that…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the well known tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) board game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields", each of them being a tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player…
The two-player, complete information game of Cops and Robber is played on undirected finite graphs. A number of cops and one robber are positioned on vertices and take turns in sliding along edges. The cops win if, after a move, a cop and…
We analyze the two-player game of Knock 'em Down, asymptotically as the number of tokens to be knocked down becomes large. Optimal play requires mixed strategies with deviations of order sqrt(n) from the naive law-of-large numbers…