Related papers: How far can Nim in disguise be stretched?

The game of Antonim is a variant of the game Nim, with the additional rule that heaps are not allowed to be the same size. A winning strategy for three heap Antonim has been solved. We will discuss the solution to three-heap Antonim and…

Minority game is a model of heterogeneous players who think inductively. In this game, each player chooses one out of two alternatives every turn and those who end up in the minority side wins. It is instructive to extend the minority game…

The concept of nimbers--a.k.a. Grundy-values or nim-values--is fundamental to combinatorial game theory. Nimbers provide a complete characterization of strategic interactions among impartial games in their disjunctive sums as well as the…

Imitation is simple behavior which uses successful actions of others in order to deal with one's own problems. Because success of imitation generally depends on whether profit of an imitating agent coincides with those of other agents or…

The numbers game is a one-player game played on a finite simple graph with certain "amplitudes" assigned to its edges and with an initial assignment of real numbers to its nodes. The moves of the game successively transform the numbers at…

Node-Kayles is a well-known impartial combinatorial game played on graphs, where players alternately select a vertex and remove it along with its neighbors. By the Sprague-Grundy theorem, every position of an impartial game corresponds to a…

Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…

Zero-sum and non-zero-sum (aka general-sum) games are relevant in a wide range of applications. While general non-zero-sum games are computationally hard, researchers focus on the special class of monotone games for gradient-based…

In the game of Graph Nimors, two players alternately perform graph minor operations (deletion and contraction of edges) on a graph until no edges remain, at which point the player who last moved wins. We present theoretical and experimental…

We consider a game in which the action set of each player is uncountable, and show that, from weak assumptions on the common prior, any mixed strategy has an approximately equivalent pure strategy. The assumption of this result can be…

Combinatorial Scoring games, with the property `extra pass moves for a player does no harm', are characterized. The characterization involves an order embedding of Conway's Normal-play games. Also, we give a theorem for comparing games with…

We examine short combinatorial games for three or more players under a new play convention in which a player who cannot move on their turn is the unique loser. We show that many theorems of impartial and partizan two-player games under…

We study so-called invariant games played with a fixed number $d$ of heaps of matches. A game is described by a finite list $\mathcal{M}$ of integer vectors of length $d$ specifying the legal moves. A move consists in changing the current…

We study the periodicity of nim-sequences for subtraction games having subtraction sets with three elements. In particular, we give solutions in several cases, and we describe how these subtraction sets can be augmented by additional…

The main challenge of combinatorial game theory is to handle combinatorial chaos, if one player knows the strategy better than his opponent, he is able to determine the exact results of a game. If both players are qualified competitor, the…

In the game of $n-Sim$, two players take it in turn to claim unclaimed edges from a complete graph on $n$ vertices, with the first person to create a triangle in his own edges being the loser. We present some strategy-stealing arguments…

The game of i-Mark is an impartial combinatorial game introduced by Sopena (2016). The game is parametrized by two sets of positive integers $S$, $D$, where $\min D\ge 2$. From position $n\ge 0$ one can move to any position $n-s$, $s\in S$,…

We explore a version of the minimax theorem for two-person win-lose games with infinitely many pure strategies. In the countable case, we give a combinatorial condition on the game which implies the minimax property. In the general case, we…

Let $S$ be a set of positive integers, and let $D$ be a set of integers larger than $1$. The game $i$-Mark$(S,D)$ is an impartial combinatorial game introduced by Sopena (2016), which is played with a single pile of tokens. In each turn, a…

We study a variant of the chip-firing game called the diffusion game. In the diffusion game, we begin with some integer labelling of the vertices of a graph, interpreted as a number of chips on each vertex, and then for each subsequent step…