English

Solving Maker-Breaker Games on 5-uniform hypergraphs is PSPACE-complete

Discrete Mathematics 2025-02-28 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

Let (X,F)(X, \mathcal{F}) be a hypergraph. The Maker-Breaker game on (X,F)(X, \mathcal{F}) is a combinatorial game between two players, Maker and Breaker. Beginning with Maker, the players take turns claiming vertices from XX that have not yet been claimed. Maker wins if she manages to claim all vertices of some hyperedge FFF \in \mathcal{F}. Breaker wins if he claims at least one vertex in every hyperedge. M. L. Rahman and Thomas Watson proved in 2021 that, even when only Maker-Breaker games on 6-uniform hypergraphs are considered, the decision problem of determining which player has a winning strategy is PSPACE-complete. They also showed that the problem is NL-hard when considering hypergraphs of rank 5. In this paper, we improve the latter result by showing that deciding who wins Maker-Breaker games on 5-uniform hypergraphs is still a PSPACE-complete problem. We achieve this by polynomial transformation from the problem of solving the generalized geography game on bipartite digraphs with vertex degrees 3 or less, which is known to be PSPACE-complete.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.20271,
  title  = {Solving Maker-Breaker Games on 5-uniform hypergraphs is PSPACE-complete},
  author = {Finn Orson Koepke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20271},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 2 tables containing figures, 5 references

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:00:28.601Z