Related papers: Unique Winning Opening Move in Three-Row Chomp
We prove PSPACE-completeness of Push-1: given a rectangular grid of 1 x 1 cells, each possibly occupied by a movable block, can a robot move from one specified location to another, given the ability to push up to one block at a time? In…
This paper extends the work started in 2002 by Demaine, Demaine and Verill (DDV) on coin-moving puzzles. These puzzles have a long history in the recreational literature, but were first systematically analyzed by DDV, who gave a full…
The well-known three distance theorem states that there are at most three distinct gaps between consecutive elements in the set of the first n multiples of any real number. We generalise this theorem to higher dimensions under a suitable…
We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a connected graph using distance probes, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West showed that for any $n$-vertex…
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…
Gale, Kuhn and Tucker (1950) introduced two ways to reduce a zero-sum game by packaging some strategies with respect to a probability distribution on them. In terms of value, they gave conditions for a desirable reduction. We show that a…
In this paper; we prove that all sequences can be broken up in cycles. Each cycle follows the same pattern: 1) Upward trajectory. Odd and even numbers alternate until the cycle reaches an upper bound 2) Downward trajectory. Two or more…
We investigate a one-time single shelf shuffle by establishing the position matrix explicitly. In some cases, we prove a no-feedback optimal guessing strategy. A general no-feedback strategy is conjectured, and asymptotics for the expected…
Under a natural asumption on the drift, the law of the simple random walk on the multidimensional first quadrant conditioned to always stay in the first octant was obtained by O'Connell in [O]. It coincides with that of the image of the…
The classical Three Gap Theorem asserts that for a natural number n and a real number p, there are at most three distinct distances between consecutive elements in the subset of [0,1) consisting of the reductions modulo 1 of the first n…
In a series of papers, G. Harmer and D. Abbott study the behavior of random walks associated with games introduced in 1997 by J. M. R. Parrondo. These games illustrate an apparent paradox that random and deterministic mixtures of losing…
We analyze misere play of impartial tic-tac-toe---a game suggested by Bob Koca in which both players make X's on the board, and the first player to complete three-in-a-row loses. This game was recently discussed on mathoverflow.net in a…
An edge switch is an operation which makes a local change in a graph while maintaining the degree of every vertex. We introduce a switch move, called a triangle switch, which creates or deletes at least one triangle. Specifically, a make…
Normally a chess problem must have a unique solution, and is deemed unsound even if there are alternatives that differ only in the order in which the same moves are played. In an enumerative chess problem, the set of moves in the solution…
We introduce achievement positional games, a convention for positional games which encompasses the Maker-Maker and Maker-Breaker conventions. We consider two hypergraphs, one red and one blue, on the same vertex set. Two players, Left and…
In the classical cop and robber game, two players, the cop C and the robber R, move alternatively along edges of a finite graph G. The cop captures the robber if both players are on the same vertex at the same moment of time. A graph G is…
We introduce the idea of an n-simplex graph and games upon simplicial complexes. We then define moves on a labeled graph and pose the problem of whether given two labelings of a graph it is possible to change one into another via these…
In a Maker-Breaker game there are two players, Maker and Breaker, where Maker wins if they create a specified structure while Breaker wins if they prevent Maker from winning indefinitely. A $3$-term arithmetic progression, or $3$-AP, is a…
In 1937, Lothar Collatz conjectured that the sequence generated by the rule $f(n)=3n+1$ for $n\in\mathbb{N}$ odd, $f(n)=n/2$ for $n\in\mathbb{N}$ even, starting in any positive integer $n$ produces $1$. This is equivalent to (1) there are…
Recently Wilson [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 274--325] introduced an important new technique for lower bounding the mixing time of a Markov chain. In this paper we extend Wilson's technique to find lower bounds of the correct order for…