Related papers: Taming the wild in impartial combinatorial games

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…

The traditional mathematical model for an impartial combinatorial game is defined recursively as a set of the options of the game, where the options are games themselves. We propose a model called gamegraph, together with its generalization…

Game theory is used by all behavioral sciences, but its development has long centered around tools for relatively simple games and toy systems, such as the economic interpretation of equilibrium outcomes. Our contribution, compositional…

Much progress has been made in misere game theory using the technique of restricted misere play, where games can be considered equivalent inside a restricted set of games without being equal in general. This paper provides a survey of…

Evolutionary game theory is a common framework to study the evolution of cooperation, where it is usually assumed that the same game is played in all interactions. Here, we investigate a model where the game that is played by two…

Absolute combinatorial game theory was recently developed as a unifying tool for constructive/local game comparison (Larsson et al. 2018). The theory concerns {\em parental universes} of combinatorial games; standard closure properties are…

We study an impartial avoidance game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The game is played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who cannot select an element without making…

The Sprague-Grundy (SG) theory reduces the sum of impartial games to the classical game of $NIM$. We generalize the concept of sum and introduce $\cH$-combinations of impartial games for any hypergraph $\cH$. In particular, we introduce the…

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,…

In this paper, we study impartial achievement games and impartial avoidance games introduced by Anderson and Harary. Using the criteria of maximal subgroups, we study the game for Frobenius groups and non-abelian groups with all abelian…

We investigate the Sprague-Grundy sequences for two normal-play impartial games based on arithmetic functions, first described by Iannucci and Larsson in \cite{sum}. In each game, the set of positions is N (natural numbers). In saliquant,…

We introduce the category of optiongraphs and option-preserving maps as a model to study impartial combinatorial games. Outcomes, remoteness, and extended nim-values are preserved under option-preserving maps. We show that the four…

Subtraction games are a class of impartial combinatorial games whose positions correspond to nonnegative integers and whose moves correspond to subtracting one of a fixed set of numbers from the current position. Though they are easy to…

We study two impartial games introduced by Anderson and Harary and further developed by Barnes. Both games are played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a…

We initiate the study of simple games from the point of view of combinatorial topology. The starting premise is that the losing coalitions of a simple game can be identified with a simplicial complex. Various topological constructions and…

We study an impartial game introduced by Anderson and Harary. This game is played by two players who alternately choose previously-unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a generating set from the jointly-selected…

A class of discrete Bidding Combinatorial Games that generalize alternating normal play was introduced by Kant, Larsson, Rai, and Upasany (2022). The major questions concerning optimal outcomes were resolved. By generalizing standard game…

Two players alternate moves in the following impartial combinatorial game: Given a finitely generated abelian group $A$, a move consists of picking some nonzero element $a \in A$. The game then continues with the quotient group $A/ \langle…

Game-theoretic probability uses the structure of gambles to define a concept like probability, but which is more flexible and robust. We show that results in game-theoretic probability can be thought of as minimax theorems for specific…

We examine short combinatorial games for three or more players under a new play convention in which a player who cannot move on their turn is the unique loser. We show that many theorems of impartial and partizan two-player games under…