Related papers: Phutball Endgames are Hard

We consider the $n\times n$ game of Phutball. It is shown that, given an arbitrary position of stones on the board, it is a PSPACE-hard problem to determine whether the specified player can win the game, regardless of the opponent's choices…

In this short note, we exhibit a draw in the game of Philosopher's Phutball. We construct a position on a 12 x 10 Phutball board from where either player has a drawing strategy, and then generalize it to an m x n board with m-2 >= n >= 10.

We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…

We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…

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…

We consider infinite duration alternating move games. These games were previously studied by Roth, Balcan, Kalai and Mansour. They presented an FPTAS for computing an approximated equilibrium, and conjectured that there is a polynomial…

An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…

This brief paper describes the single-player card game called "Perpetual Motion" and reports on a computational analysis of the game's outcome. The analysis follows a Monte Carlo methodology based on a sample of 10,000 randomly generated…

We consider two-player games played on weighted directed graphs with mean-payoff and total-payoff objectives, two classical quantitative objectives. While for single-dimensional games the complexity and memory bounds for both objectives…

Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…

We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…

We study the problem of deciding the winner of reachability switching games for zero-, one-, and two-player variants. Switching games provide a deterministic analogue of stochastic games. We show that the zero-player case is NL-hard, the…

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…

Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…

In this paper we study the complexity of strategic argumentation for dialogue games. A dialogue game is a 2-player game where the parties play arguments. We show how to model dialogue games in a skeptical, non-monotonic formalism, and we…

In the "Game about Squares" the task is to push unit squares on an integer lattice onto corresponding dots. A square can only be moved into one given direction. When a square is pushed onto a lattice point with an arrow the direction of the…

n infinite two-player zero-sum game with a Borel winning set, in which the opponent's actions are monitored eventually but not necessarily immediately after they are played, is determined. The proof relies on a representation of the game as…

The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…

We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…

A famous result in game theory known as Zermelo's theorem says that "in chess either White can force a win, or Black can force a win, or both sides can force at least a draw". The present paper extends this result to the class of all…