Related papers: King Chasing Problem in Chinese Chess is NP-hard
We study a stochastic game where one player tries to find a strategy such that the state process reaches a target of controlled-loss-type, no matter which action is chosen by the other player. We provide, in a general setup, a relaxed…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
We study a strategic version of the multi-armed bandit problem, where each arm is an individual strategic agent and we, the principal, pull one arm each round. When pulled, the arm receives some private reward $v_a$ and can choose an amount…
The number of ways to place $q$ nonattacking queens, bishops, or similar chess pieces on an $n\times n$ square chessboard is essentially a quasipolynomial function of $n$ (by Part I of this series). The period of the quasipolynomial is…
We explore the clearing problem in the barter exchange market. The problem, described in the terminology of graph theory, is to find a set of vertex-disjoint, length-restricted cycles that maximize the total weight in a weighted digraph.…
An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…
We revisit the complexity of deciding, given a {\it bimatrix game,} whether it has a {\it Nash equilibrium} with certain natural properties; such decision problems were early known to be ${\mathcal{NP}}$-hard~\cite{GZ89}. We show that…
We investigate complexity issues related to pure Nash equilibria of strategic games. We show that, even in very restrictive settings, determining whether a game has a pure Nash Equilibrium is NP-hard, while deciding whether a game has a…
Despite its long history, the classical game of peg solitaire continues to attract the attention of the scientific community. In this paper, we consider two problems with an algorithmic flavour which are related with this game, namely…
We consider turn-based stochastic two-player games with a combination of a parity condition that must hold surely, that is in all possible outcomes, and of a parity condition that must hold almost-surely, that is with probability 1. The…
By creating some new concepts and methods: checking tree, long unit path, direct contradiction unit pair, indirect contradiction unit pair, additional contradiction unit pair, 2-unit layer and 3-unit layer, redundant units, and destroying…
Itemset mining is one of the most studied tasks in knowledge discovery. In this paper we analyze the computational complexity of three central itemset mining problems. We prove that mining confident rules with a given item in the head is…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
We study strategic games on weighted directed graphs, in which the payoff of a player is defined as the sum of the weights on the edges from players who chose the same strategy, augmented by a fixed non-negative integer bonus for picking a…
Reinforcement Learning has recently surfaced as a very powerful tool to solve complex problems in the domain of board games, wherein an agent is generally required to learn complex strategies and moves based on its own experiences and…
Fortification-interdiction games are tri-level adversarial games where two opponents act in succession to protect, disrupt and simply use an infrastructure for a specific purpose. Many such games have been formulated and tackled in the…
This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…
Due to the lack of coordination, it is unlikely that the selfish players of a strategic game reach a socially good state. A possible way to cope with selfishness is to compute a desired outcome (if it is tractable) and impose it. However…
We show the chess billiard map, which was introduced in [HM] in order to study a generalization of the $n$-Queens problem in chess, is a circle homeomorphism. We give a survey of some of the known results on circle homeomorphisms, and apply…
A tournament is a complete directed graph. A king in a tournament is a vertex v such that every other vertex is reachable from v via a path of length at most 2. It is well known that every tournament has at least one king, one of which is a…