Related papers: Random-Turn Hex and other selection games
Online Ramsey game is played between Builder and Painter on an infinite board $K_{\mathbb N}$. In every round Builder selects an edge, then Painter colors it red or blue. Both know target graphs $H_1$ and $H_2$. Builder aims to create…
In Texas hold'em, after an all-in bet is made and called before the flop, the turn, or the river, the two players sometimes agree to run it $n$ times, meaning that the remaining five, two, or one cards are dealt out not just once but $n$…
The classical Maker-Breaker positional game is played on a board which is a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, with two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately claiming vertices of $\mathcal{H}$ until all the vertices are claimed. When the game…
We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…
We investigate a game played between two players, Maker and Breaker, on a countably infinite complete graph where the vertices are the rational numbers. The players alternately claim unclaimed edges. It is Maker's goal to have after…
This paper considers a natural ruleset for playing a partisan combinatorial game on a directed graph, which we call Digraph Placement. Given a digraph $G$ with a not necessarily proper $2$-coloring of $V(G)$, the Digraph Placement game…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…
An ordered graph is a graph with a linear ordering on its vertices. The online Ramsey game for ordered graphs $G$ and $H$ is played on an infinite sequence of vertices; on each turn, Builder draws an edge between two vertices, and Painter…
The allocation of resources plays an important role in the completion of system objectives and tasks, especially in the presence of strategic adversaries. Optimal allocation strategies are becoming increasingly more complex, given that…
Stochastic games combine controllable and adversarial non-determinism with stochastic behavior and are a common tool in control, verification and synthesis of reactive systems facing uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic games are natural…
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…
The semi-random graph process is a single player game in which the player is initially presented an empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a vertex $u$ is presented to the player independently and uniformly at random. The player then…
In the game "Super Six", after successfully getting rid of a stick by rolling with the die a number that is not occupied, the player has the choice to continue to roll the die or to stop and to hand over the die to their opponent. The…
We investigate a two player game called the $K^4$-building game: two players alternately claim edges of an infinite complete graph. Each player's aim is to claim all six edges on some vertex set of size four for themself. The first player…
We study variations of classical combinatorial games on two finite heaps of tokens, a.k.a. \emph{subtraction games}. Given non-negative integers $p_1,q_1, p_2,q_2$, where $p_1q_2 > q_1p_2$, $p_1>0$ and $q_2>0$, two players alternate in…
A famous result in game theory known as Zermelo's theorem says that "in chess either White can force a win, or Black can force a win, or both sides can force at least a draw". The present paper extends this result to the class of all…
We analyze the two-player game of Knock 'em Down, asymptotically as the number of tokens to be knocked down becomes large. Optimal play requires mixed strategies with deviations of order sqrt(n) from the naive law-of-large numbers…
We define a two-player combinatorial game in which players take alternate turns; each turn consists on deleting a vertex of a graph, together with all the edges containing such vertex. If any vertex became isolated by a player's move then…
Evolutionary games on networks traditionally involve the same game at each interaction. Here we depart from this assumption by considering mixed games, where the game played at each interaction is drawn uniformly at random from a set of two…