Questions tagged [combinatorial-game-theory]
Two-player turn-based perfect-information games, surreal numbers, impartial games and Sprague-Grundy theory, partizan games
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A game on Noetherian rings
A friend suggested the following combinatorial game. At any time, the state of the game is a (commutative) Noetherian ring $\neq 0$. On a player's turn, that player chooses a nonzero non-unit element ...
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Checkmate in $\omega$ moves?
Is there a chess position with a finite number of pieces on the infinite chess board $\mathbb{Z}^2$ such that White to move has a forced win, but Black can stave off mate for at least $n$ moves for ...
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A little number theoretic game
I came up with this little two player game:
The players take turns naming a positive integer. When one player says the number $n$, the other player can only reply in two different ways: They can ...
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What is a chess piece mathematically?
Historically, the current "standard" set of chess pieces wasn't the only existing alternative or even the standard one. For instance, the famous Al-Suli's Diamond Problem (which remained ...
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Decidability of chess on an infinite board
The recent question Do there exist chess positions that require exponentially many moves to reach? of Tim Chow reminds me of a problem I have been interested in. Is chess with finitely many men on an ...
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In the two-person Killing the Hydra game, what is the winning strategy?
My question is which player has a winning strategy in the
two-player version of the Killing the Hydra game?
In their amazing paper,
Kirby, Laurie; Paris, Jeff, Accessible independence results for ...
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Do there exist chess positions that require exponentially many moves to reach?
By "chess" here I mean chess played on an $n\times n$ board with an unbounded number of (non-king) pieces. Some care is needed if you want to generalize some of the subtler rules of chess to an $n\...
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Does knight behave like a king in his infinite odyssey?
The Knight's Tour is a well-known mathematical chess problem. There is an extensive amount of research concerning this question in two/higher dimensional finite boards. Here, I would like to tackle ...
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Conway's game of life for random initial position
What is the behavior of Conway's game of life when the initial position is random? -- We can ask this question on an infinite grid or on an $n$ by $n$ table (planar or on a torus). Specifically ...
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Verifying the correctness of a Sudoku solution
A Sudoku is solved correctly, if all columns, all rows and all 9 subsquares are filled with the numbers 1 to 9 without repetition. Hence, in order to verify if a (correct) solution is correct, one has ...
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A game on integers
$A$ and $B$ take turns to pick integers: $A$ picks one integer and then $B$ picks $k > 1$ integers ($k$ being fixed). A player cannot pick a number that his opponent has picked. If $A$ has $5$ ...
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Can one make high-level proofs about chess positions?
I realize this question is risky (as the title and the tags indicate), but hopefully I can make it acceptable. If not, and the question cannot be salvaged, I'm sorry and ready to delete it or accept ...
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Is there any superstable configuration in the game of life?
This question spins off of Gil Kalai's recent question on Conway's game of life for a random initial configuration.
There are numerous configurations in the game of life that are known to be stable-...
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Who wins two player sudoku?
Let's say players take turns placing numbers 1-9 on a sudoku board. They must not create an invalid position (meaning that you can not have the same number in within a row, column, or box region). The ...
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A hat puzzle question—how to prove the standard solution is optimal?
I am currently writing an essay on hat puzzles, and for the warm-up section I introduce some of the standard finite hat puzzles. One of these proceeds as follows:
You and two friends are each given a ...
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Is there a position in infinite Go for which the life of a particular stone has transfinite game value?
As follow up to Checkmate in $\omega$ moves?, we can ask the same question about go. Is there a position on a $\mathbb Z \times \mathbb Z$ goban such that either black can kill a white group, but ...
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Vanishing line on Conway's game of life
If the initial state of Conway's game of life is a line of $n \in [0,100]$ alive cells, then it vanishes completely after some steps iff $n \in \{0,1,2,6,14,15,18,19,23,24 \}$. See below for $n=24$.
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Is this representation of Go (game) irreducible?
This post is freely inspired by the basic rules of Go (game), usually played on a $19 \times 19$ grid graph.
Consider the $\mathbb{Z}^2$ grid. We can assign to each vertex a state "black" ($b$), "...
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Why is game theory formulated in terms of equilibrium instead of winning strategies?
Game theory, on the outset, seems to invite the questions,
"what can I do to win" or "how do I beat my opponent?"
So many people who are not familiar with game theory look to game ...
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Solution to simple mathematical game
Consider the following game (that I made up). Two players each attempt to name a target number. The first player begins by naming 1. On each subsequent turn, a player can name any larger number that ...
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Alice and Bob playing on a circle
I want to solve this problem:
Let there be $n \ge 2$ points around a circle. Alice and Bob play a game on the circle. They take moves in turn with Alice beginning. At each move:
Alice takes one ...
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Are Conway's combinatorial games the "monster model" of any familiar theory?
This is related to this question about a "mother of all" groups, and so seemed like it'd fit in better at MO than MSE.
If I understand the answer to that question correctly, the surreal numbers have ...
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Players alternate moving a $\{\swarrow,\uparrow,\rightarrow\}$ piece on a chessboard
Edit $4.$ $-$ Proposing to reopen the question (the related competition should be over by now).
Edit $3.$ $-$ I have just found out that the linked competition (see the "Edit $1$.") is still ...
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Who wins this two-player game based on the sandpile model?
Given a connected graph $G$, two players, Blue and Green, play the following game: initially, all vertices are unclaimed. Players alternate turns. On her turn, Blue adds a token to either an ...
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The Chocolatier's game: can the Glutton win with a restricted form of strategy?
I have a question about the Chocolatier's game, which I had
introduced in my recent answer to a question of Richard
Stanley.
To recap the game quickly, the Chocolatier offers up at each stage
a finite ...
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Sane bound on number of moves for Maker-Breaker game on $\mathbb R^2$ for $\{0,1,2,3,4\}$
The description below comes from
József Beck. Combinatorial games. Tic-tac-toe theory, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, 114. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, MR2402857 (...
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Neutral tic tac toe
I heard this puzzle from Bob Koca. Suppose we play misere tic-tac-toe (a.k.a. noughts and crosses) where both players are X. Who wins?
That particular puzzle is easy to solve, but more generally, ...
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What is the complexity of the winning condition in infinite Hex? In particular, is infinite Hex a Borel game?
Consider the game of infinite Hex, where two players Red and Blue alternately place their stones on the infinite hex grid, each aiming to create a winning configuration.
Red wins after infinite play, ...
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Rolling-ball game
The analyses
in two recent MO questions
("recent" with respect to the original posting in 2011),
"Rolling a random walk on a sphere"
and
"Maneuvering with limited moves on $S^2$,"
suggest a Rolling-...
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The 1-step vanishing polyplets on Conway's game of life
A $n$-polyplet is a collection of $n$ cells on a grid which are orthogonally or diagonally connected.
The number of $n$-polyplets is given by the OEIS sequence A030222: $1, 2, 5, 22, 94, 524, 3031, \...
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Irreversible chess
Suppose we play a chess-variant, where any finite number of pieces are allowed, and the board is as large as we wish, but only two kings in total. And there is no 50 move-rule, no castling and no ...
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Who wins the Rubik's cube game?
This game has two players, Spoiler and Solver. We start with a solved 3x3x3 rubik's cube (to make the problem easier).
Solver and Spoiler take turns making 90 degree twists (starting with Solver). ...
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A Ramsey avoidance game
Consider the following game: Given $K_n$ the complete graph on $n$ vertices, two players take turns coloring its edges. Initially no edges are colored. At his turn a player can color a prevoiusly not ...
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What is the winning strategy in this pebble game?
Consider the following two-player pebble game. We have finitely
many stones on a finite linear track of squares. We take turns, and
the allowed moves are:
move any one stone one square to the left, ...
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Generalization of a mind-boggling box-opening puzzle
Motivation. Suppose we are given $6$ boxes, arranged in the following manner:
$$\left[\begin{array}{ccc} 1 & 2 & 3 \\ 4 & 5 & 6 \end{array}\right]$$
Two of these boxes contain a ...
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Variation on a matrix game
The original problem appeared on last year's Putnam exam:
"Alan and Barbara play a game in which they take turns filling entries of an initially empty 2008×2008 array. Alan plays first. At each turn, ...
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When is a game tree the game tree of a board game?
This question arises from what I find interesting in the recently
asked question What is a chess piece
mathematically?
My answer to that question was that mathematically, game pieces are
in general ...
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The arithmetic progression game and its variations: can you find optimal play?
Consider the arithmetic progression game, a two-player game of
perfect information, in which the players take turns playing
natural numbers, or finite sets of natural numbers, all distinct,
and the ...
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David Gale's subset take-away game
I learned of this problem through Su Gao, who heard of it years ago while a post-doc at Caltech. David Gale introduced this game in the 70s, I believe. I am only aware of two references in print:
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Removing pawns - the game
Here is a simple game I've invented (if the idea is not fresh, then please let me know):
The game is played on a board.
The board has some (finite) number of lines drawn on it.
A pawn is placed on ...
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Tic-tac-toe with one mark type
Parameters $a,b,c$ are given such that $c\leq\max(a,b)$. In an $a\times b$ board, two players take turns putting a mark on an empty square. Whoever gets $c$ consecutive marks horizontally, vertically, ...
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Determine or estimate the number of maximal triangle-free graphs on $n$ vertices
Among the collections of the open problems of Paul Erdős on the website of
Professor Fan Chung, there is one called "number of triangle-free graphs".
http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~erdosproblems/erdos/...
user39815
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Are the moves/rules of standard chess delicately balanced?
(While the world chess championship is in progress in Sochi...)
Is there mathematical evidence that standard chess is somehow
...
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Nimber multiplication
Is there a game-theoretic interpretation of nimber multiplication? There is such for addition (a single move in a+b is either a move in a or a move in b).
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Mathematical solution for a two-player single-suit trick taking game?
The question on games and mathematics that appeared recently on mathoverflow
(Which popular games are the most mathematical?)
reminded me of a problem I encountered some time ago : starting with the ...
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What does "game theory" cover and how should it be called?
There seems to be a huge discrepancy in what people refer to when they speak of "game theory". I tend to think of it as including, among other things:
Combinatorial game theory dealing with certain ...
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Traversing the infinite square grid
Starting somewhere on an infinite square grid, is it possible to visit every square exactly once, if at move $n$, one must jump $a_n$ steps in one of the directions north,south,east or west, and mark ...
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Are there any interesting connections between Game Theory and Algebraic Topology?
I've been learning game theory on my own and was just curious how it connected with previous things I've learned. So are there any interesting connections between Game Theory and Algebraic Topology? ...
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In theory, how would Oneiric numbers be defined?
Background I am not a professional mathematician. I am researching Surreal numbers & games for fun (I think they are truly beautiful). If this question is not appropriate here, I beg forgiveness &...
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Winning strategy at chomp (a chocolate bar game)?
The game of chomp is an example of a game with very simple rules, but no known winning strategy in general.
I copy the rules from Ivars Peterson's page:
Chomp starts with a rectangular array of ...
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