English

Impartial achievement games for generating nilpotent groups

Group Theory 2024-02-12 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

We study an impartial game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The game is played by two players who alternately choose previously-unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a generating set from the jointly-selected elements wins. We determine the nim-numbers of this game for finite groups of the form T×HT \times H, where TT is a 22-group and HH is a group of odd order. This includes all nilpotent and hence abelian groups.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.01409,
  title  = {Impartial achievement games for generating nilpotent groups},
  author = {Bret J. Benesh and Dana C. Ernst and Nandor Sieben},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.01409},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:44:19.770Z