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We introduce a topological combinatorial game called the Region Smoothing Swap Game. The game is played on a game board derived from the connected shadow of a link diagram on a (possibly non-orientable) surface by smoothing at crossings.…
We pursue the possible connections between classical games and quantum computation. The Parrondo game is one in which a random combination of two losing games produces a winning game. We introduce novel realizations of this Parrondo effect…
A new approach to play games quantum mechanically is proposed. We consider two players who perform measurements in an EPR-type setting. The payoff relations are defined as functions of *correlations*, i.e. without reference to classical or…
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 prove new theoretical results about several variations of the cop and robber game on graphs. First, we consider a variation of the cop and robber game which is more symmetric called the cop and killer game. We prove for all $c < 1$ that…
We present a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where one is allowed to choose in each turn the game that a large number of individuals play. It turns out that, by choosing the game which gives the highest average earnings at…
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…
When a game involves many agents or when communication between agents is not possible, it is useful to resort to distributed learning where each agent acts in complete autonomy without any information on the other agents' situations.…
Domination game [SIAM J.\ Discrete Math.\ 24 (2010) 979--991] and total domination game [Graphs Combin.\ 31 (2015) 1453--1462] are by now well established games played on graphs by two players, named Dominator and Staller. In this paper,…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…
Two-player graph games are a fundamental model for reasoning about the interaction of agents. These games are played between two players who move a token along a graph. In bidding games, the players have some monetary budget, and at each…
In this paper we will discuss scoring play games. We will give the basic definitions for scoring play games, and show that they form a well defined set, with clear and distinct outcome classes under these definitions. We will also show that…
We propose a class of cooperative games, called d Partitioned Compbinatorial Optimization Games (PCOGs). The input of PCOG consists of a set of agents and a combinatorial structure (typically a graph) with a fixed optimization goal on this…
We introduce and study pawn games, a class of two-player zero-sum turn-based graph games. A turn-based graph game proceeds by placing a token on an initial vertex, and whoever controls the vertex on which the token is located, chooses its…
We propose and analyse a 2-parameter family of 2-player games on two heaps of tokens, and present a strategy based on a class of sequences. The strategy looks easy, but is actually hard. A class of exotic numeration systems is then used,…
In 2010, Bre\v{s}ar, Klav\v{z}ar and Rall introduced the optimization variant of the graph domination game and the game domination number, which was proved PSPACE-hard by Bre\v{s}ar et al. in 2016. In 2024, Leo Versteegen obtained the…
We introduce a new type of positional games, played on a vertex set of a graph. Given a graph $G$, two players claim vertices of $G$, where the outcome of the game is determined by the subgraphs of $G$ induced by the vertices claimed by…
A matching game is a cooperative profit game defined on an edge-weighted graph, where the players are the vertices and the profit of a coalition is the maximum weight of matchings in the subgraph induced by the coalition. A population…
We introduce Shortest Connection Game, a two-player game played on a directed graph with edge costs. Given two designated vertices in which they start, the players take turns in choosing edges emanating from the vertex they are currently…
In this paper, we consider combinatorial game rulesets based on data structures normally covered in an undergraduate Computer Science Data Structures course: arrays, stacks, queues, priority queues, sets, linked lists, and binary trees. We…