Related papers: How to Beat Capablanca
Domineering is a combinatorial game played on a subset of a rectangular grid between two players. Each board position can be put into one of four outcome classes based on who the winner will be if both players play optimally. In this note,…
The $(m,b)$ Maker-Breaker percolation game on $(\mathbb{Z}^2)_p$, introduced by Day and Falgas-Ravry, is played in the following way. Before the game starts, each edge of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ is removed independently with probability $1-p$. After…
We prove that in the biased 1:b Hamiltonicity Maker-Breaker game, played on the edges of the complete graph K_n, Maker has a winning strategy for b(n)<=(1-o(1))n/ln n, for all large enough n.
At some places (see the references) Martin Erickson describes a certain game: "Two players alternately write O's (first player) and X's (second player) in the unoccupied cells of an n x n grid. The first player (if any) to occupy four cells…
Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial…
The Parrondo effect describes the seemingly paradoxical situation in which two losing games can, when combined, become winning [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 24 (2000)]. Here we generalize this analysis to the case where both games are…
"Egyptian Ratscrew" (ERS) is a modern American card game enjoyed by millions of players worldwide. A game of ERS is won by collecting all of the cards in the deck. Typically this game is won by the player with the fastest reflexes, since…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
Motivated by the controversy in the chess community, where Hikaru Nakamura, a renowned grandmaster, has posted multiple impressive winning streaks over the years on the online platform chess.com, we derive the probabilities of various types…
We show that there is an $m=2n+o(n)$, such that, in the Maker-Breaker game played on $\Z^d$ where Maker needs to put at least $m$ of his marks consecutively in one of $n$ given winning directions, Breaker can force a draw using a pairing…
We consider random-turn positional games, introduced by Peres, Schramm, Sheffield and Wilson in 2007. A $p$-random-turn positional game is a two-player game, played the same as an ordinary positional game, except that instead of alternating…
We consider the chessboard pebbling problem analyzed by Chung, Graham, Morrison and Odlyzko [3]. We study the number of reachable configurations $G(k)$ and a related double sequence $G(k,m)$. Exact expressions for these are derived, and we…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of many systems, in particular those with conflicting constraints, can be considerably speeded up by using multicanonical or related methods. Some of these approaches sample with a-priori unknown weight factors.…
We introduce a mean field game with rank-based reward: competing agents optimize their effort to achieve a goal, are ranked according to their completion time, and paid a reward based on their relative rank. First, we propose a tractable…
In classical Maker-Breaker games on graphs, Maker and Breaker take turns claiming edges; Maker's goal is to claim all of some structure (e.g., a spanning tree, Hamilton cycle, etc.), while Breaker aims to stop her. The standard question…
In this paper we answer a question posed by R. Stanley in his collection of Bijection Proof Problems (Problem 240). We present a bijective proof for the enumeration of walks of length $k$ a chess rook can move along on an $m\times n$ board…
From the viewpoint of networks, a ranking system for players or teams in sports is equivalent to a centrality measure for sports networks, whereby a directed link represents the result of a single game. Previously proposed network-based…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…
For a positive integer $k$ we consider the $k$-vertex-connectivity game, played on the edge set of $K_n$, the complete graph on $n$ vertices. We first study the Maker-Breaker version of this game and prove that, for any integer $k \geq 2$…