Related papers: Coin-Moving Puzzles
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
A quantum board game is a multi-round protocol between a single quantum player against the quantum board. Molina and Watrous discovered quantum hedging. They gave an example for perfect quantum hedging: a board game with winning probability…
Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
On the blockchain, NFT games have risen in popularity, spawning new types of digital assets. We present a simplified version of well-known NFT games, followed by a discussion of issues influencing the structure and stability of generic…
The Generalized Sliding-Tile Puzzle (GSTP), allowing many square tiles on a board to move in parallel while enforcing natural geometric collision constraints on the movement of neighboring tiles, provide a high-fidelity mathematical model…
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 $n>3$,…
I give an analysis of the simplest non-commutative quantum game, which is a gambling game much like Heads or Tails. The quantum gamespace displays strategies which are not interpretable through direct-product strategies of the two players.…
We consider two-player stochastic games played on a finite state space for an infinite number of rounds. The games are concurrent: in each round, the two players (player 1 and player 2) choose their moves independently and simultaneously;…
Stochastic games are an important class of problems that generalize Markov decision processes to game theoretic scenarios. We consider finite state two-player zero-sum stochastic games over an infinite time horizon with discounted rewards.…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the game. Such games are central in formal verification since they model the interaction between a…
In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner of the game. Such games are central in formal methods since they model the interaction between a…
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 consider a repeated Matching Pennies game in which players have limited access to randomness. Playing the (unique) Nash equilibrium in this n-stage game requires n random bits. Can there be Nash equilibria that use less than n random…
We study unique games and estimate some of their values. We prove that if a unique game has a quantum-assisted value close to 1, then it must have a perfect deterministic strategy. We introduce a family of unique games based on groups that…
We study the problem of finding robust equilibria in multiplayer concurrent games with mean payoff objectives. A $(k,t)$-robust equilibrium is a strategy profile such that no coalition of size $k$ can improve the payoff of one its member by…
Given a series of photographs taken during a Go game, we describe the techniques we successfully employ for pinpointing the grid lines of the Go board and for tracking their small movements between consecutive photographs; then we discuss…
A setup is proposed to play a quantum version of the famous bimatrix game of Prisoners' Dilemma. Multi-slit electron diffraction with each player's pure strategy consisting of opening one of the two slits at his/her disposal are essential…
Cooperative games with nonempty core are called balanced, and the set of balanced games is a polyhedron. Given a game with empty core, we look for the closest balanced game, in the sense of the (weighted) Euclidean distance, i.e., the…
We recast move generators for solving board games as operations on compressed sets of strings. We aim for compressed representations with space sublinear in the number of game positions for interesting sets of positions, move generation in…