Related papers: The $3\times 3$ Solution to the Game of Tak
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
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…
We examine short combinatorial games for three or more players under a new play convention in which a player who cannot move on their turn is the unique loser. We show that many theorems of impartial and partizan two-player games under…
In this paper we solve the three-player-game question. A three-player-game consists of a series of rounds. There are altogether three players. Two players participate in each round, at the end of the round the loser quits and the third…
By treating combinatorial games as dynamical systems, we are able to address a longstanding open question in combinatorial game theory, namely, how the introduction of a "pass" move into a game affects its behavior. We consider two well…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…
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…
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…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the popular Tic-Tac-Toe game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields," with each field constituting its own miniature tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player must…
We analyze misere play of impartial tic-tac-toe---a game suggested by Bob Koca in which both players make X's on the board, and the first player to complete three-in-a-row loses. This game was recently discussed on mathoverflow.net in a…
Zeckendorf proved that every natural number $n$ can be expressed uniquely as a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers, called its Zeckendorf decomposition. Baird-Smith, Epstein, Flint, and Miller created the Zeckendorf game, a two-player…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
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)…
Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…
The main challenge of combinatorial game theory is to handle combinatorial chaos, if one player knows the strategy better than his opponent, he is able to determine the exact results of a game. If both players are qualified competitor, the…
Consider QBF, the Quantified Boolean Formula problem, as a combinatorial game ruleset. The problem is rephrased as determining the winner of the game where two opposing players take turns assigning values to boolean variables. In this…
We introduce and analyze the ordered Zeckendorf game, a novel combinatorial two-player game inspired by Zeckendorf's Theorem, which guarantees a unique decomposition of every positive integer as a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers.…
We study the following game. Three players start with initial capitals of $s_{1},s_{2},s_{3}$ dollars; in each round player $P_{m}$ is selected with probability $\frac{1}{3}$; then \emph{he} selects player $P_{n}$ and they play a game in…
We analyse the computational complexity of finding Nash equilibria in turn-based stochastic multiplayer games with omega-regular objectives. We show that restricting the search space to equilibria whose payoffs fall into a certain interval…
We introduce and analyze a natural game formulated as follows. In this one-person game, the player is given a random permutation $A=(a_1,\dots, a_n)$ of a multiset $M$ of $n$ reals that sum up to $0$, where each of the $n!$ permutation…