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Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-01-29 Urban Larsson , Richard J. Nowakowski , Carlos P. Santos

The authors present formulas for the previous player's winning positions of two variants of restricted Nim. In both of these two games, there is one pile of stones, and in the first variant, we investigate the case that in k-th turn, you…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-12-01 Keita Mizugaki , Shoei Takahashi , Hikaru Manabe , Aoi Murakami , Ryohei Miyadera

Candy Nim is a variant of Nim in which both players aim to take the last candy in a game of Nim, with the added simultaneous secondary goal of taking as many candies as possible. We give bounds on the number of candies the first and second…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-05-21 Nitya Mani , Rajiv Nelakanti , Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo , Alex Tholen

Bachet's game is a variant of the game of Nim. There are $n$ objects in one pile. Two players take turns to remove any positive number of objects not exceeding some fixed number $m$. The player who takes the last object loses. We consider a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-16 Dmitry Dagaev , Ilya Schurov

We study a game where two players take turns selecting points of a convex geometry until the convex closure of the jointly selected points contains all the points of a given winning set. The winner of the game is the last player able to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-04-20 Stephanie McCoy , Nándor Sieben

Let A be a finite subset of $\nat$. Then NIM(A;n) is the following 2-player game: initially there are $n$ stones on the board and the players alternate removing $a\in A$ stones. The first player who cannot move loses. This game has been…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-11-13 William Gasarch , John Purtilo , Douglas Ulrich

We introduce a problem set-up we call the Iterated Matching Pennies (IMP) game and show that it is a powerful framework for the study of three problems: adversarial learnability, conventional (i.e., non-adversarial) learnability and…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2016-02-10 Michael Brand , David L. Dowe

We determine the mis\`{e}re equivalence classes of Nim positions under two equivalence relations: one based on playing disjunctive sums with other impartial games, and one allowing sums with partizan games. In the impartial context, the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-07-25 Mark Spindler

By treating combinatorial games as dynamical systems, we are able to address a longstanding open question in combinatorial game theory, namely, how the introduction of a "pass" move into a game affects its behavior. We consider two well…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-04-17 Rebecca E. Morrison , Eric J. Friedman , Adam S. Landsberg

We introduce the notion of invariant vectors of a game and develop the Invariance Reduction Process, which first uses reduction of positions via invariance and then zero and merge reductions of games to arrive at smaller, solved sub-games…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-06 Balaji R. Kadam , Matthieu Dufour , Silvia Heubach

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-08-03 Richard Adams , Janae Dixon , Jennifer Elder , Jamie Peabody , Oscar Vega , Karen Willis

The game of Nim as played on graphs was introduced in Nim on Graphs I and extended in Nim on Graphs II by Masahiko Fukuyama. His papers detail the calculation of Grundy numbers for graphs under specific circumstances. We extend these…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-10-08 Lindsay Erickson

A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-27 Kengo Hashimoto

We introduce the game Slow $A$-Nim which generalizes a number of recently studied games. Slow $A$-Nim is played on $n$ stacks of tokens, and the set $A$ indicates the number of stacks a player can play on. Once a player has decided on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Silvia Heubach , Matthieu Dufour

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-01-12 Endre Boros , Vladimir Gurvich , Nhan Bao Ho , Kazuhisa Makino , Peter Mursic

In this paper, we consider two-player impartial games with a pass-move. A disjunctive compound of games is a position in which, on each turn, the current player chooses one of the components and makes a legal move in it. For disjunctive…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Hikaru Manabe , Ryohei Miyadera , Koki Suetsugu

The deduction game may be thought of as a variant on the classical game of cops and robber in which the cops (searchers) aim to capture an invisible robber (evader); each cop is allowed to move at most once, and cops situated on different…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Andrea C. Burgess , Nancy E. Clarke , Shannon L. Fitzpatrick , Melissa A. Huggan

We present take-away games whose Sprague-Grundy functions are given by the Nim sum of heap sizes in a mixed base $\beta$. Let $\Delta_\beta$ be the set of such games. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-01-09 Yuki Irie

We provide a winning strategy for sums of games of MARK-t, an impartial game played on the nonnegative integers where each move consists of subtraction by an integer between 1 and t-1 inclusive, or division by t, rounding down when…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-08-10 Alan Guo

We introduce Multiplicative Modular Nim (MuM), a variant of Nim in which the traditional nim-sum is replaced by heap-size multiplication modulo m. We establish a complete theory for this game, beginning with a direct, Bouton-style analysis…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Satyam Tyagi