Related papers: Amazons is PSPACE-complete
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…
In the past few years, AlphaZero's exceptional capability in mastering intricate board games has garnered considerable interest. Initially designed for the game of Go, this revolutionary algorithm merges deep learning techniques with the…
We study the bisimilarity problem for probabilistic pushdown automata (pPDA) and subclasses thereof. Our definition of pPDA allows both probabilistic and non-deterministic branching, generalising the classical notion of pushdown automata…
We consider combinatorial avoidance and achievement games based on graph Ramsey theory: The players take turns in coloring still uncolored edges of a graph G, each player being assigned a distinct color, choosing one edge per move. In…
We extend the study of the 2-Solo Chess problem which was first introduced by Aravind, Misra, and Mittal in 2022. 2-Solo Chess is a single-player variant of chess in which the player must clear the board via captures such that only one…
Concurrent parameterized games involve a fixed yet arbitrary number of players. They are described by finite arenas in which the edges are labeled with languages that describe the possible move combinations leading from one vertex to…
The game of Go has long served as a benchmark for artificial intelligence, demanding sophisticated strategic reasoning and long-term planning. Previous approaches such as AlphaGo and its successors, have predominantly relied on model-based…
Node Kayles is a well-known two-player impartial game on graphs: Given an undirected graph, each player alternately chooses a vertex not adjacent to previously chosen vertices, and a player who cannot choose a new vertex loses the game. The…
The class of Guaranteed Scoring Games (GS) are two-player combinatorial games with the property that Normal-play games (Conway et. al.) are ordered embedded into GS. They include, as subclasses, the scoring games considered by Milnor…
Simulation and bisimulation metrics for stochastic systems provide a quantitative generalization of the classical simulation and bisimulation relations. These metrics capture the similarity of states with respect to quantitative…
Concurrent games with a fixed number of agents have been thoroughly studied, with various solution concepts and objectives for the agents. In this paper, we consider concurrent games with an arbitrary number of agents, and study the problem…
It is non-trivial to design engaging and balanced sets of game rules. Modern chess has evolved over centuries, but without a similar recourse to history, the consequences of rule changes to game dynamics are difficult to predict. AlphaZero…
We study algorithmic complexity of solving subtraction games in a~fixed dimension with a finite difference set. We prove that there exists a game in this class such that any algorithm solving the game runs in exponential time. Also we prove…
Game comonads offer a categorical view of a number of model-comparison games central to model theory, such as pebble and Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e games. Remarkably, the categories of coalgebras for these comonads capture preservation of…
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…
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 the pebble game on DAGs with bounded fan-in introduced in [Paterson and Hewitt '70] and the reversible version of this game in [Bennett '89], and study the question of how hard it is to decide exactly or approximately the number…
We study the parameterized complexity of several positional games. Our main result is that Short Generalized Hex is W[1]-complete parameterized by the number of moves. This solves an open problem from Downey and Fellows' influential list of…
Network congestion games are a well-understood model of multi-agent strategic interactions. Despite their ubiquitous applications, it is not clear whether it is possible to design information structures to ameliorate the overall experience…
The Hanano Puzzle is a one-player game with irreversible gravity, where the goal is to make colored blocks make contact with flowers of the corresponding color. The game Jelly no Puzzle shares similar mechanics. In general, determining if a…