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We study repeated multi-player vector-valued games in which a player observes a payoff vector each round and evaluates outcomes through linear scalarizations of those vectors. Different from most prior works, the choice of scalarization is…
Su-Doku, a popular combinatorial puzzle, provides an excellent testbench for heuristic explorations. Several interesting questions arise from its deceptively simple set of rules. How many distinct Su-Doku grids are there? How to find a…
Modern board games are a rich source of entertainment for many people, but also contain interesting and challenging structures for game playing research and implementing game playing agents. This paper studies the game Patchwork, a two…
Solving Sudoku puzzles is one of the most popular pastimes in the world. Puzzles range in difficulty from easy to very challenging; the hardest puzzles tend to have the most empty cells. The current paper explains and compares three…
We analyze the problem of packing squares in an online fashion: Given a semi-infinite strip of width 1 and an unknown sequence of squares of side length in [0,1] that arrive from above, one at a time. The objective is to pack these items as…
In this paper, we consider stochastic monotone Nash games where each player's strategy set is characterized by possibly a large number of explicit convex constraint inequalities. Notably, the functional constraints of each player may depend…
Weighted voting games are a well-known and useful class of succinctly representable simple games that have many real-world applications, e.g., to model collective decision-making in legislative bodies or shareholder voting. Among the…
Motivated by recent experiments on objects moved vertically through a bed a glass beads, a simple model to study granular drag is proposed. The model consists of dimers on a slanted two-dimensional lattice through which objects are dragged…
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…
Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…
Hedonic games model settings in which a set of agents have to be partitioned into groups which we call coalitions. In the enemy aversion model, each agent has friends and enemies, and an agent prefers to be in a coalition with as few…
We propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
Artificial intelligence has advanced significantly through the development of intelligent game-playing systems, providing rigorous testbeds for decision-making, strategic planning, and adaptive learning. However, resource-constrained…
We study systems of String Equations where block variables need to be assigned strings so that their concatenation gives a specified target string. We investigate this problem under a multivariate complexity framework, searching for…
Colonel Blotto games with discrete strategy spaces effectively illustrate the intricate nature of multidimensional strategic reasoning. This paper studies the equilibrium set of such games where, in line with prior experimental work, the…
We study the complexity of several combinatorial problems in the model of binary networked public goods games. In this game, players are represented by vertices in a network, and the action of each player can be either investing or not…
Planning with options -- a sequence of primitive actions -- has been shown effective in reinforcement learning within complex environments. Previous studies have focused on planning with predefined options or learned options through expert…
AlphaZero and its extension MuZero are computer programs that use machine-learning techniques to play at a superhuman level in chess, go, and a few other games. They achieved this level of play solely with reinforcement learning from…
Tic Tac Toe is amongst the most well-known games. It has already been shown that it is a biased game, giving more chances to win for the first player leaving only a draw or a loss as possibilities for the opponent, assuming both the players…
In hedonic diversity games (HDGs), recently introduced by Bredereck, Elkind and Igarashi (2019), each agent belongs to one of two classes (men and women, vegetarians and meat-eaters, junior and senior researchers), and agents' preferences…