Related papers: Quoridor is PSPACE-Hard
We pursue the possible connections between classical games and quantum computation. The Parrondo game is one in which a random combination of two losing games produces a winning game. We introduce novel realizations of this Parrondo effect…
Imperfect information games, such as Bridge and Skat, present challenges due to state-space explosion and hidden information, posing formidable obstacles for search algorithms. Determinization-based algorithms offer a resolution by sampling…
Combinatorial games played between two players, called Spoiler and Duplicator, have often been used to capture syntactic properties of formal logical languages. For instance, the widely used Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e (EF) game captures the…
We present an algebraic framework for the analysis of combinatorial games. This framework embraces the classical theory of partizan games as well as a number of misere games, comply-constrain games, and card games that have been studied…
We consider random-turn positional games, introduced by Peres, Schramm, Sheffield and Wilson in 2007. A $p$-random-turn positional game is a two-player game, played the same as an ordinary positional game, except that instead of alternating…
A query game is a pair of a set $Q$ of queries and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of functions, or codewords $f:Q\rightarrow \mathbb{Z}.$ We think of this as a two-player game. One player, Codemaker, picks a hidden codeword $f\in \mathcal{F}$. The…
In combinatorial game theory, the winning player for a position in normal play is analyzed and characterized via algebraic operations. Such analyses define a value for each position, called a game value. A game (ruleset) is called universal…
Encoding 2-player games in QBF correctly and efficiently is challenging and error-prone. To enable concise specifications and uniform encodings of games played on grid boards, like Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect-4, Domineering, Pursuer-Evader and…
A poset game is a two-player game played over a partially ordered set (poset) in which the players alternate choosing an element of the poset, removing it and all elements greater than it. The first player unable to select an element of the…
This paper provides effective methods for the polyhedral formulation of impartial finite combinatorial games as lattice games. Given a rational strategy for a lattice game, a polynomial time algorithm is presented to decide (i) whether a…
In this paper, we present a board game: Square War. The game definition of Square War is similar to the classic Chinese board game Go. Then we propose a mathematical problem of the game Square War. Finally, we show that the problem can be…
Zero-sum games such as chess and poker are, abstractly, functions that evaluate pairs of agents, for example labeling them `winner' and `loser'. If the game is approximately transitive, then self-play generates sequences of agents of…
We investigate the combinatorial game Slime Trail.This game is played on a graph with a starting piece in a node. Each player's objective is to reach one of their own goal nodes. Every turn the current player moves the piece and deletes the…
In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…
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…
Recently, a standardized framework was proposed for introducing quantum-inspired moves in mathematical games with perfect information and no chance. The beauty of quantum games-succinct in representation, rich in structures, explosive in…
We present a quantum implementation of Parrondo's game with randomly switched strategies using 1) a quantum walk as a source of ``randomness'' and 2) a completely positive (CP) map as a randomized evolution. The game exhibits the same…
Lipschitz games, in which there is a limit $\lambda$ (the Lipschitz value of the game) on how much a player's payoffs may change when some other player deviates, were introduced about 10 years ago by Azrieli and Shmaya. They showed via the…
We consider the computational complexity of Hearthstone which is a popular online CCG (collectible card game). We reduce a PSPACE-complete problem, the partition game, to perfect information Hearthstone in which there is no hidden…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of the well-studied pushing-block puzzle Push-1F, a theoretical abstraction of many video games (introduced in 1999). The proof also extends to Push-$k$ for any $k \ge 2$. We also prove PSPACE-completeness of…