Related papers: Phutball Endgames are Hard
We show that the problem of deciding whether in a multi-player perfect information recursive game (i.e. a stochastic game with terminal rewards) there exists a stationary Nash equilibrium ensuring each player a certain payoff is Existential…
In many multiagent environments, a designer has some, but limited control over the game being played. In this paper, we formalize this by considering incompletely specified games, in which some entries of the payoff matrices can be chosen…
In this work we address a game theoretic variant of the shortest path problem, in which two decision makers (players) move together along the edges of a graph from a given starting vertex to a given destination. The two players take turns…
We study alternating good-for-games (GFG) automata, i.e., alternating automata where both conjunctive and disjunctive choices can be resolved in an online manner, without knowledge of the suffix of the input word still to be read. We show…
This note investigates the combinatorics of permutations underlying the NYT daily word game Waffle. It helps to solve Waffle games and helps to understand why some games are easy to solve while others are very hard. It shows that a perfect…
We consider a two player simultaneous-move game where the two players each select any permissible $n$-sided die for a fixed integer $n$. A player wins if the outcome of his roll is greater than that of his opponent. Remarkably, for $n>3$,…
Turn-based discounted-sum games are two-player zero-sum games played on finite directed graphs. The vertices of the graph are partitioned between player 1 and player 2. Plays are infinite walks on the graph where the next vertex is decided…
Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…
Consider equipping an alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ with a group action that partitions the set of words into equivalence classes which we call patterns. We answer standard questions for the Penney's game on patterns and show non-transitivity for…
We consider election scenarios with incomplete information, a situation that arises often in practice. There are several models of incomplete information and accordingly, different notions of outcomes of such elections. In one well-studied…
Evolutionary game theory is a powerful mathematical framework to study how intelligent individuals adjust their strategies in collective interactions. It has been widely believed that it is impossible to unilaterally control players'…
In an Avoider-Enforcer game, we are given a hypergraph. Avoider and Enforcer alternate in claiming an unclaimed vertex, until all the vertices of the hypergraph are claimed. Enforcer wins if Avoider claims all vertices of an edge; Avoider…
We prove that chess played on the infinite chessboard $\mathbb{Z}^2$ with infinitely many pieces is as powerful as it could possibly be, by showing that every open Gale-Stewart game with draws is strategically equivalent to some infinite…
Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 by Michael Paterson and John Conway. The game starts with p spots drawn on a sheet of paper, and lasts at most 3p-1 moves: the player who makes the last move wins. Sprouts is a very…
A general position set of a graph $G$ is a set of vertices $S$ in $G$ such that no three vertices from $S$ lie on a common shortest path. In this paper we introduce and study the general position achievement game. The game is played on a…
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…
We generalise the hyperplane separation technique (Chatterjee and Velner, 2013) from multi-dimensional mean-payoff to energy games, and achieve an algorithm for solving the latter whose running time is exponential only in the dimension, but…
In a seminal paper, Meyer [David Meyer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 1052 (1999)] described the advantages of quantum game theory by looking at the classical penny flip game. A player using a quantum strategy can win against a classical player…
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…