English

A Constructive Winning Maker Strategy in the Maker-Breaker $C_4$-Game

Combinatorics 2024-06-27 v2

Abstract

Maker-Breaker subgraph games are among the most famous combinatorial games. For given n,qNn,q \in \mathbb{N} and a subgraph CC of the complete graph KnK_n, the two players, called Maker and Breaker, alternately claim edges of KnK_n. In each round of the game Maker claims one edge and Breaker is allowed to claim up to qq edges. If Maker is able to claim all edges of a copy of CC, he wins the game. Otherwise Breaker wins. In this work we introduce the first constructive strategy for Maker for the C4C_4-Maker-Breaker game and show that he can win the game if q<0.16n2/3q < 0.16 n^{2/3}. According to the theorem of Bednarska and Luczak (2000) n2/3n^{2/3} is asymptotically optimal for this game, but the constant given there for a random Maker strategy is magnitudes apart from our constant 0.16.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.04462,
  title  = {A Constructive Winning Maker Strategy in the Maker-Breaker $C_4$-Game},
  author = {Matthias Sowa and Anand Srivastav},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.04462},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:19:44.424Z