Related papers: Diagonal Peg Solitaire
We study a simple motion differential game of many pursuers and one evader in the plane. We give a nonempty closed convex set in the plane, and the pursuers and evader move on this set. They cannot leave this set during the game. Control…
We create a new two-player game on the Sperner Triangle based on Sperner's lemma. Our game has simple rules and several desirable properties. First, the game is always certain to have a winner. Second, like many other interesting games such…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…
The study of the combinatorial game Nim and its variants is rich and varied, but little is known of the game Nim with a Pass. It is Nim, but once per game a player is permitted to skip their turn but this can only be done if a nonempty pile…
We explain a highly efficient algorithm for playing the simplest type of dots and boxes endgame optimally (by which we mean "in such a way so as to maximise the number of boxes that you take"). The algorithm is sufficiently simple that it…
In a monotonic sequence game, two players alternately choose elements of a sequence from some fixed ordered set. The game ends when the resulting sequence contains either an ascending subsequence of length a or a descending one of length d.…
We investigate the problem of constructing planar drawings with few bends for two related problems, the partially embedded graph problem---to extend a straight-line planar drawing of a subgraph to a planar drawing of the whole graph---and…
Dull, weak and nested solitaire games are important classes of parity games, capturing, among others, alternation-free mu-calculus and ECTL* model checking problems. These classes can be solved in polynomial time using dedicated algorithms.…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
The square peg problem asks whether every Jordan curve in the plane has four points which form a square. The problem has been resolved (positively) for various classes of curves, but remains open in full generality. We present two new…
A certain class of partial differential equations possesses singular solutions having discontinuous first derivatives ("peakons"). The time evolution of peaks of such solutions is governed by a finite dimensional completely integrable…
Consider a periodical (in two independent directions) tiling of the plane with polygons (faces). In this article we shall only give examples using squares, regular hexagons, equilateral triangles and parallelograms ("unions" of two…
The Gale-Berlekamp Light Switching Game is played on a square board of lights. Each light has two states, either on or off. There is a switch to every row and column. Turning this switch would change the state of all the lights on that row…
Domineering is a two player game played on a checkerboard in which one player places dominoes vertically and the other places them horizontally. We give bivariate generating polynomials enumerating Domineering positions by the number of…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
We investigate the problem of drawing two posets of the same ground set so that one is drawn from left to right and the other one is drawn from the bottom up. The input to this problem is a directed graph $G = (V, E)$ and two sets $X, Y$…
A large class of Positional Games are defined on the complete graph on $n$ vertices. The players, Maker and Breaker, take the edges of the graph in turns, and Maker wins iff his subgraph has a given -- usually monotone -- property. Here we…
The semi-random graph process is a single-player game that begins with 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 adaptively selects a vertex…
The convex rope problem is to find a counterclockwise or clockwise convex rope starting at the vertex a and ending at the vertex b of a simple polygon P, where a is a vertex of the convex hull of P and b is visible from infinity. The convex…
A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…