Related papers: Phutball Endgames are Hard
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
Consider an election where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must choose exactly one candidate to nominate for the election held over all nominees. The Necessary President problem asks whether a candidate, if…
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
Generalized Geography is a combinatorial game played on a directed graph. Players take turns moving a token from vertex to vertex, deleting a vertex after moving the token away from it. A player unable to move loses. It is well known that…
We consider games played on finite graphs, whose goal is to obtain a trace belonging to a given set of winning traces. We focus on those states from which Player 1 cannot force a win. We explore and compare several criteria for establishing…
We study zero-sum games, a variant of the classical combinatorial Subtraction games (studied for example in the monumental work "Winning Ways", by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy), called Cumulative Subtraction (CS). Two players alternate in…
We show how the software Walnut can be used to obtain concise proofs of results concerning variants of the famous Wythoff game, in which blocking maneuvers or terminal positions are added, as discussed respectively by Larsson (2011) and…
Despite its long history, the classical game of peg solitaire continues to attract the attention of the scientific community. In this paper, we consider two problems with an algorithmic flavour which are related with this game, namely…
We study a simple example of a sequential game illustrating problems connected with making rational decisions that are universal for social sciences. The set of chooser's optimal decisions that manifest his preferences in case of a constant…
Mean-payoff games are important quantitative models for open reactive systems. They have been widely studied as games of full observation. In this paper we investigate the algorithmic properties of several sub-classes of mean-payoff games…
We introduce the Maker-Breaker domination game, a two player game on a graph. At his turn, the first player, Dominator, select a vertex in order to dominate the graph while the other player, Staller, forbids a vertex to Dominator in order…
Partially-ordered set games, also called poset games, are a class of two-player combinatorial games. The playing field consists of a set of elements, some of which are greater than other elements. Two players take turns removing an element…
Motivated by the results for Magic: The Gathering presented in [CBH20] and [Bid20], we study a (different) computability problem about winning strategies in Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, a popular card game developed and published by Konami.…
Schmidt's game is a powerful tool for studying properties of certain sets which arise in Diophantine approximation theory, number theory, and dynamics. Recently, many new results have been proven using this game. In this paper we address…
An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…
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…
In this article, we study the decision-making process of chess players by using a chess engine to evaluate the moves across different pools of games. We quantified the decisiveness of each move during the games using a metric derived from…
We investigate multi-round team competitions between two teams, where each team selects one of its players simultaneously in each round and each player can play at most once. The competition defines an extensive-form game with perfect…
The focus of this essay is a rigorous treatment of infinite games. An infinite game is defined as a play consisting of a fixed number of players whose sequence of moves is repeated, or iterated ad infinitum. Each sequence corresponds to a…
We provide answers to natural combinatorial questions which arise from learning the rules to Tak. We solve the discarded cases of the $3\times 3$ game not previously considered by Joshua Achiam, showing that Player $1$ has a forced win from…