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Something is definitely wrong. If the game has a linear winning strategy, then it is tractable. What's going on? Well, we describe a two-person game which has a definite winner, that is, a player who can force a win in a finite number of…
During the last twenty years, a lot of research was conducted on the sport elimination problem: Given a sports league and its remaining matches, we have to decide whether a given team can still possibly win the competition, i.e., place…
We study the computational complexity of an important property of simple, regular and weighted games, which is decisiveness. We show that this concept can naturally be represented in the context of hypergraph theory, and that decisiveness…
Penney's game is a two player zero-sum game in which each player chooses a three-flip pattern of heads and tails and the winner is the player whose pattern occurs first in repeated tosses of a fair coin. Because the players choose…
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…
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
We introduce and study Minkowski games. These are two player games, where the players take turns to chose positions in $\mathbb{R}^d$ based on some rules. Variants include boundedness games, where one player wants to keep the positions…
A valuation for a player in a game in extensive form is an assignment of numeric values to the players moves. The valuation reflects the desirability moves. We assume a myopic player, who chooses a move with the highest valuation.…
Blackwell games are infinite games of imperfect information. The two players simultaneously make their moves, and are then informed of each other's moves. Payoff is determined by a Borel measurable function $f$ on the set of possible…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…
We study the problem of checking for the existence of constrained pure Nash equilibria in a subclass of polymatrix games defined on weighted directed graphs. The payoff of a player is defined as the sum of nonnegative rational weights on…
"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…
Using coalgebraic methods, we extend Conway's theory of games to possibly non-terminating, i.e. non-wellfounded games (hypergames). We take the view that a play which goes on forever is a draw, and hence rather than focussing on winning…
There are many combinatorial games in which a move can terminate the game, such as a checkmate in chess. These moves give rise to diverse situations that fall outside the scope of the classical normal play structure. To analyze these games,…
This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…
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 give a formal definition of the popular word-guessing game Wordle. We show that, in general, determining if a given Wordle instance admits a winning strategy is NP-complete. We also show that given a Wordle instance of…
We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…
Weighted voting games are a popular class of coalitional games that are widely used to model real-life situations of decision-making. They can be applied, for instance, to analyze legislative processes in parliaments or voting in corporate…
Parity games are abstract infinite-round games that take an important role in formal verification. In the basic setting, these games are two-player, turn-based, and played under perfect information on directed graphs, whose nodes are…