Related papers: How to Beat Capablanca
We consider Chess played on an $m \times n$ board (with $m$ and $n$ arbitrary positive integers), with only the two kings and the white rook remaining, but placed at arbitrary positions. Using the symbolic finite state method, developed by…
Fog of War chess is a popular variant of classical chess, in which both players have only partial information about the position of the opponent's pieces. This study provides the first theoretical analysis of endgames in Fog of War chess.…
In his list of open problems, Martin Erickson described a certain game: "Two players alternately put queens on an n x n chess board so that each new queen is not in range of any queen already on the board (the color of the queens is…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
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…
In this paper we analyze classical Maker-Breaker games played on the edge set of a sparse random board $G\sim \gnp$. We consider the Hamiltonicity game, the perfect matching game and the $k$-connectivity game. We prove that for $p(n)\geq…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the optimal strategy. The exact blackjack…
We consider a Maker-Breaker type game on the plane, in which each player takes $t$ points on their $t^\textrm{th}$ turn. Maker wins if he obtains $n$ points on a line (in any direction) without any of Breaker's points between them. We show…
One of the main objective of this paper is to relate Beck's conjecture for k-in-a-row games. The conjecture states that playing on the same board Picker is better off in a Chooser-Picker game than the second player in the Maker-Breaker…
Reinforcement Learning has recently surfaced as a very powerful tool to solve complex problems in the domain of board games, wherein an agent is generally required to learn complex strategies and moves based on its own experiences and…
In this paper we experiment with a 2-player strategy board game where playing models are evolved using reinforcement learning and neural networks. The models are evolved to speed up automatic game development based on human involvement at…
There are several approaches for using computers in deriving mathematical proofs. For their illustration, we provide an in-depth study of using computer support for proving one complex combinatorial conjecture -- correctness of a strategy…
In a strong game played on the edge set of a graph G there are two players, Red and Blue, alternating turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of G (with Red playing first). The winner is the first one to claim all the edges of some…
A common format for sports contests involves pairwise matches between two teams, with the #1 player of team A matched against the #1 player of team B, the #2 player of team A against the #2 player of team B, and so on. This paper addresses…
A placement of chess pieces on a chessboard is called dominating, if each free square of the chessboard is under attack by at least one piece. In this contribution we compute the number of dominating arrangements of $k$ rooks on an $n\times…
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…
Recent work in reinforcement learning demonstrated that learning solely through self-play is not only possible, but could also result in novel strategies that humans never would have thought of. However, optimization methods cast as a game…
In numerous positional games the identity of the winner is easily determined. In this case one of the more interesting questions is not {\em who} wins but rather {\em how fast} can one win. These type of problems were studied earlier for…
In a seminal paper, Meyer [David Meyer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 1052 (1999)] described the advantages of quantum game theory by looking at the classical penny flip game. A player using a quantum strategy can win against a classical player…