Related papers: Juniper Green and the Gallai-Edmonds Decomposition
The game of peg solitaire on graphs was introduced by Beeler and Hoilman in 2011. In this game, pegs are initially placed on all but one vertex of a graph $G$. If $xyz$ forms a path in $G$ and there are pegs on vertices $x$ and $y$ but not…
We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…
Deep learning is built on the foundational guarantee that gradient descent on an objective function converges to local minima. Unfortunately, this guarantee fails in settings, such as generative adversarial nets, that exhibit multiple…
The information decomposition problem requires an additive decomposition of the mutual information between the input and target variables into nonnegative terms. The recently introduced solution to this problem, Information Attribution,…
The graph coloring game is a famous two-player game (re)introduced by Bodlaender in $1991$. Given a graph $G$ and $k \in \mathbb{N}$, Alice and Bob alternately (starting with Alice) color an uncolored vertex with some color in…
The Reward-Penalty-Selection Problem (RPSP) can be seen as a combination of the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and the Hitting Set Problem (HSP). Given a set of elements, a set of reward sets, and a set of penalty sets, one tries to find a subset…
In Combinatorial Game Theory, short game forms are defined recursively over all the positions the two players are allowed to move to. A form is decomposable if it can be expressed as a disjunctive sum of two forms with smaller birthday. If…
We study the geometric structure of the set of cooperative transferable utility games having a nonempty core, characterized by Bondareva and Shapley as balanced games. We show that this set is a nonpointed polyhedral cone, and we find the…
Gentle algebras form a class of finite-dimensional algebras introduced by I. Assem and A. Skowro\'{n}ski in the 1980s. Modules over such an algebra can be described by string and band combinatorics in the associated gentle quiver from the…
This paper coins the notion of Joker games, a variant of concurrent games where the players are not strictly adversarial. Instead, Player 1 can get help from Player 2 by playing a Joker move. We formalize these games as cost games and…
Partially-ordered set games, also called poset games, are a class of two-player combinatorial games. The playing field consists of a set of elements, some of which are greater than other elements. Two players take turns removing an element…
We study an impartial avoidance game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The game is played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who cannot select an element without making…
In this paper, we introduce a graph coloring game called the Edge-Distinguishing Game (EDGe). The edge-distinguishing chromatic number of a graph is used to determine the moves each player can make. We determine which player has a winning…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
Entropy games and matrix multiplication games have been recently introduced by Asarin et al. They model the situation in which one player (Despot) wishes to minimize the growth rate of a matrix product, whereas the other player (Tribune)…
Conventional noncooperative game theory hypothesizes that the joint strategy of a set of players in a game must satisfy an "equilibrium concept". All other joint strategies are considered impossible; the only issue is what equilibrium…
We introduce several methods of decomposition for two player normal form games. Viewing the set of all games as a vector space, we exhibit explicit orthonormal bases for the subspaces of potential games, zero-sum games, and their orthogonal…
General game playing (GGP) is a framework for evaluating an agent's general intelligence across a wide range of tasks. In the GGP competition, an agent is given the rules of a game (described as a logic program) that it has never seen…
J. Conway defined useful operations on the Class of combinatorial games and also introduced a notion of equivalence between games. Conway showed that, under his equivalence, games form a Group. However, Conway product is not well defined on…
We introduce the game of Surrounding Cops and Robbers on a graph, as a variant of the original game of Cops and Robbers. In contrast to the original game in which the cops win by occupying the same vertex as the robber, they now win by…