Related papers: Juniper Green and the Gallai-Edmonds Decomposition

In the past three decades, deductive games have become interesting from the algorithmic point of view. Deductive games are two players zero sum games of imperfect information. The first player, called "codemaker", chooses a secret code and…

We consider Flipping Coins, a partizan version of the impartial game Turning Turtles, played on lines of coins. We show the values of this game are numbers, and these are found by first applying a reduction, then decomposing the position…

With increasing game size, a problem of computational complexity arises. This is especially true in real world problems such as in social systems, where there is a significant population of players involved in the game, and the complexity…

We introduce a class of cooperative games induced by weighted directed graphs. Specifically, the coalitional value combines an internal interaction term given by the induced subgraph game with an external component based on minimal incoming…

In this paper, we introduce a two-player impartial game on graphs, called a {\em feedback game}, which is a variant of the generalized geography. We study the feedback game on Eulerian graphs. In particular, we show that the…

The Game of Cycles is a two-player impartial mathematical game, introduced by Francis Su in his book Mathematics for Human Flourishing (2020). The game is played on simple planar graphs in which players take turns marking edges using a…

Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 by Michael Paterson and John Conway. The game starts with p spots, lasts at most 3p-1 moves, and the player who makes the last move wins. In the misere version of Sprouts, on the…

A finite impartial game is a two-player game in which the players take turns making moves and the game ends after finitely many moves. In this paper, we study a class of finite impartial games introduced by H.~Lenstra, which we call coin…

We introduce a new two-player game on graphs, in which players alternate choosing vertices until the set of chosen vertices forms a dominating set. The last player to choose a vertex is the winner. The game fits into the scheme of several…

The move-minimizing puzzles presented here are certain types of one-player combinatorial games that are shown to have explicit solutions whenever they can be encoded in a certain way as diamond-colored modular or distributive lattices. Our…

The traditional mathematical model for an impartial combinatorial game is defined recursively as a set of the options of the game, where the options are games themselves. We propose a model called gamegraph, together with its generalization…

Generalized Geography is a combinatorial game played on a directed graph. Players take turns moving a token from vertex to vertex, deleting a vertex after moving the token away from it. A player unable to move loses. It is well known that…

The geodetic closure of a set S of vertices of a graph is the set of all vertices in shortest paths between pairs of vertices of S. A set S of vertices in a graph is geodetic if its geodetic closure contains all the vertices of the graph.…

Node-Kayles is a well-known impartial combinatorial game played on graphs, where players alternately select a vertex and remove it along with its neighbors. By the Sprague-Grundy theorem, every position of an impartial game corresponds to a…

We consider a variant of the game of Cops and Robbers, called Containment, in which cops move from edge to adjacent edge, the robber moves from vertex to adjacent vertex (but cannot move along an edge occupied by a cop). The cops win by…

The problem we are considering is the following. A colorblind player is given a set $B = \{b_1,b_2,...,b_N\}$ of $N$ colored balls. He knows that each ball is colored either red or green, and that there are less green balls (this will be…

Without further ado, we present the P_3-game. The P_3-game is decidable for elementary classes of graphs such as paths and cycles. From an algorithmic point of view, the connected P_3-game is fascinating. We show that the connected P_3-game…

Procedural generation is used across game design to achieve a wide variety of ends, and has led to the creation of several game subgenres by injecting variance, surprise or unpredictability into otherwise static designs. Information games…

We study an alternating sum involving factorials and Stirling numbers of the first kind. We give an exponential generating function for these numbers and show they are nonnegative and enumerate the number of increasing trees on $n$ vertices…

Potential games, originally introduced in the early 1990's by Lloyd Shapley, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and his colleague Dov Monderer, are a very important class of models in game theory. They have special properties such as the…