Search

The Maker-Breaker domination game is a positional game played on a graph by two players called Dominator and Staller. The players alternately select a vertex of the graph that has not yet been chosen. Dominator wins if at some point the vertices she has chosen form a dominating set of the graph. Staller wins if Dominator cannot form a dominating set. Deciding if Dominator has a winning strategy has been shown to be a PSPACE-complete problem even when restricted to chordal or bipartite graphs. In this paper, we consider strategies for Dominator based on partitions of the graph into basic subgraphs where Dominator wins as the second player. Using partitions into cycles and edges (also called perfect [1,2]-factors), we show that Dominator always wins in regular graphs and that deciding whether Dominator has a winning strategy as a second player can be computed in polynomial time for outerplanar and block graphs. We then study partitions into subgraphs with two universal vertices, which is equivalent to considering the existence of pairing dominating sets with adjacent pairs. We show that in interval graphs, Dominator wins if and only if such a partition exists. In particular, this implies that deciding whether Dominator has a winning strategy playing second is in NP for interval graphs. We finally provide an algorithm in $n^{k+3}$ for $k$-nested interval graphs (i.e. interval graphs with at most $k$ intervals included one in each other).

We propose a generalization of positional games, supplementing them with a restriction on the order in which the elements of the board are allowed to be claimed. We introduce poset positional games, which are positional games with an additional structure -- a poset on the elements of the board. Throughout the game play, based on this poset and the set of the board elements that are claimed up to that point, we reduce the set of available moves for the player whose turn it is -- an element of the board can only be claimed if all the smaller elements in the poset are already claimed. We proceed to analyse these games in more detail, with a prime focus on the most studied convention, the Maker-Breaker games. First we build a general framework around poset positional games. Then, we perform a comprehensive study of the complexity of determining the game outcome, conditioned on the structure of the family of winning sets on the one side and the structure of the poset on the other.

We study the Maker-Maker version of the domination game introduced in 2018 by Duch\^ene et al. Given a graph, two players alternately claim vertices. The first player to claim a dominating set of the graph wins. As the Maker-Breaker version, this game is PSPACE-complete on split and bipartite graphs. Our main result is a linear time algorithm to solve this game in forests. We also give a characterization of the cycles where the first player has a winning strategy.

We study the algorithmic complexity of Maker-Breaker games played on the edge sets of general graphs. We mainly consider the perfect matching game and the $H$-game. Maker wins if she claims the edges of a perfect matching in the first, and a copy of a fixed graph $H$ in the second. We prove that deciding who wins the perfect matching game and the $H$-game is PSPACE-complete, even for the latter in small-diameter graphs if $H$ is a tree. Toward finding the smallest graph $H$ for which the $H$-game is PSPACE-complete, we also prove that such an $H$ of order 51 and size 57 exists. We then give several positive results for the $H$-game. As the $H$-game is already PSPACE-complete when $H$ is a tree, we mainly consider the case where $H$ belongs to a subclass of trees. In particular, we design two linear-time algorithms, both based on structural characterizations, to decide the winners of the $P_4$-game in general graphs and the $K_{1,\ell}$-game in trees. Then, we prove that the $K_{1,\ell}$-game in any graph, and the $H$-game in trees are both FPT parameterized by the length of the game, notably adding to the short list of games with this property, which is of independent interest. Another natural direction to take is to consider the $H$-game when $H$ is a cycle. While we were unable to resolve this case, we prove that the related arboricity-$k$ game is polynomial-time solvable. In particular, when $k=2$, Maker wins this game if she claims the edges of any cycle.

Positional games have been introduced by Hales and Jewett in 1963 and have been extensively investigated in the literature since then. These games are played on a hypergraph where two players alternately select an unclaimed vertex of it. In the Maker-Breaker convention, if Maker manages to fully take a hyperedge, she wins, otherwise, Breaker is the winner. In the Maker-Maker convention, the first player to take a hyperedge wins. In both cases, the game stops as soon as Maker has taken a hyperedge. By definition, this family of games does not handle scores and cannot represent games in which players want to maximize a quantity. In this work, we introduce scoring positional games, that consist in playing on a hypergraph until all the vertices are claimed, and by defining the score as the number of hyperedges a player has fully taken. We focus here on Incidence, a scoring positional game played on a 2-uniform hypergraph, i.e. an undirected graph. In this game, two players alternately claim the vertices of a graph and score the number of edges for which they own both end vertices. In the Maker-Breaker version, Maker aims at maximizing the number of edges she owns, while Breaker aims at minimizing it. In the Maker-Maker version, both players try to take more edges than their opponent. We first give some general results on scoring positional games such that their membership in Milnor's universe and some general bounds on the score. We prove that, surprisingly, computing the score in the Maker-Breaker version of Incidence is PSPACE-complete whereas in the Maker-Maker convention, the relative score can be obtained in polynomial time. In addition, for the Maker-Breaker convention, we give a formula for the score on paths by using some equivalences due to Milnor's universe. This result implies that the score on cycles can also be computed in polynomial time.

The game INFLUENCE is a scoring combinatorial game that has been introduced in 2020 by Duchene et al. It is a good representative of Milnor's universe of scoring games, i.e. games where it is never interesting for a player to miss his turn. New general results are first given for this universe, by transposing the notions of mean and temperature derived from non-scoring combinatorial games. Such results are then applied to INFLUENCE to refine the case of unions of segments. The computational complexity of the score of the game is also solved and proved to be PSPACE-complete. We finally focus on some specific cases of INFLUENCE when the graph is bipartite, by giving explicit strategies and bounds on the optimal score on structures like grids, hypercubes or torus.

Partizan subtraction games are combinatorial games where two players, say Left and Right, alternately remove a number n of tokens from a heap of tokens, with $n \in S_L$ (resp. $n \in S_R$) when it is Left's (resp. Right's) turn. The first player unable to move loses. These games were introduced by Fraenkel and Kotzig in 1987, where they introduced the notion of dominance, i.e. an asymptotic behavior of the outcome sequence where Left always wins if the heap is sufficiently large. In the current paper, we investigate the other kinds of behaviors for the outcome sequence. In addition to dominance, three other disjoint behaviors are defined, namely weak dominance, fairness and ultimate impartiality. We consider the problem of computing this behavior with respect to $S_L$ and $S_R$, which is connected to the well-known Frobenius coin problem. General results are given, together with arithmetic and geometric characterizations when the sets $S_L$ and $S_R$ have size at most 2.

We introduce the game INFLUENCE, a scoring combinatorial game, played on a directed graph where each vertex is either colored black or white. The two players, Black and White play alternately by taking a vertex of their color and all its successors (for Black) or all its predecessors (for White). The score of each player is the number of vertices he has taken. We prove that INFLUENCE is a nonzugzwang game, meaning that no player has interest to pass at any step of the game, and thus belongs to Milnor's universe. We study this game in the particular class of paths where black and white are alternated. We give an almost tight strategy for both players when there is one path. More precisely, we prove that the first player always gets a strictly better score than the second one, but that the difference between the score is bounded by 5. Finally, we exhibit some graphs for which the initial proportion of vertices of the color of a player is as small as possible but where this player can get almost all the vertices.

This work is a contribution to the study of rewrite games. Positions are finite words, and the possible moves are defined by a finite number of local rewriting rules. We introduce and investigate taking-and-merging games, that is, where each rule is of the form a^k->epsilon. We give sufficient conditions for a game to be such that the losing positions (resp. the positions with a given Grundy value) form a regular language or a context-free language. We formulate several related open questions in parallel with the famous conjecture of Guy about the periodicity of the Grundy function of octal games. Finally we show that more general rewrite games quickly lead to undecidable problems. Namely, it is undecidable whether there exists a winning position in a given regular language, even if we restrict to games where each move strictly reduces the length of the current position. We formulate several related open questions in parallel with the famous conjecture of Guy about the periodicity of the Grundy function of octal games.

We introduce the Maker-Breaker domination game, a two player game on a graph. At his turn, the first player, Dominator, select a vertex in order to dominate the graph while the other player, Staller, forbids a vertex to Dominator in order to prevent him to reach his goal. Both players play alternately without missing their turn. This game is a particular instance of the so-called Maker-Breaker games, that is studied here in a combinatorial context. In this paper, we first prove that deciding the winner of the Maker-Breaker domination game is PSPACE-complete, even for bipartite graphs and split graphs. It is then showed that the problem is polynomial for cographs and trees. In particular, we define a strategy for Dominator that is derived from a variation of the dominating set problem, called the pairing dominating set problem.

We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can perform on a single heap. In normal play, the player with the last move wins, and the famous Sprague-Grundy theory provides a solution. We prove that several rulesets have a periodic or an arithmetic periodic Sprague-Grundy sequence (i.e. they can be partitioned into a finite number of arithmetic progressions of the same common difference). This is achieved directly for some infinite classes of games, and moreover we develop a computational testing condition, demonstrated to solve a variety of additional games. Similar results have previously appeared for various classes of games of take-and-break, for example octal and hexadecimal; see e.g. Winning Ways by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy (1982). In this context, our contribution consists of a systematic study of the subclass `break-without-take'.

We study operators that combine combinatorial games. This field was initiated by Sprague-Grundy (1930s), Milnor (1950s) and Berlekamp-Conway-Guy (1970-80s) via the now classical disjunctive sum operator on (abstract) games. The new class consists in operators for rulesets, dubbed the switch-operators. The ordered pair of rulesets (R 1 , R 2) is compatible if, given any position in R 1 , there is a description of how to move in R 2. Given compatible (R 1 , R 2), we build the push-the-button game R 1 R 2 , where players start by playing according to the rules R 1 , but at some point during play, one of the players must switch the rules to R 2 , by pushing the button ". Thus, the game ends according to the terminal condition of ruleset R 2. We study the pairwise combinations of the classical rulesets Nim, Wythoff and Euclid. In addition, we prove that standard periodicity results for Subtraction games transfer to this setting, and we give partial results for a variation of Domineering, where R 1 is the game where the players put the domino tiles horizontally and R 2 the game where they play vertically (thus generalizing the octal game 0.07)., Comment: Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), Elsevier, A Para{\^i}tre

We introduce a variant of the vertex-distinguishing edge coloring problem, where each edge is assigned a subset of colors. The label of a vertex is the union of the sets of colors on edges incident to it. In this paper we investigate the problem of finding a coloring with the minimum number of colors where every vertex receives a distinct label. Finding such a coloring generalizes several other well-known problems of vertex-distinguishing colorings in graphs.We show that for any graph (without connected component reduced to an edge or a single vertex), the minimum number of colors for which such a coloring exists can only take 3possible values depending on the order of the graph. Moreover, we provide the exact value for paths, cycles and complete binary trees.

This paper deals with sliding games, which are a variant of the better known pushpush game. On a given structure (grid, torus...), a robot can move in a specific set of directions, and stops when it hits a block or boundary of the structure. The objective is to place the minimum number of blocks such that the robot can visit all the possible positions of the structure. In particular, we give the exact value of this number when playing on a rectangular grid and a torus. Other variants of this game are also considered, by constraining the robot to stop on each case, or by replacing blocks by walls.

The game of nim, with its simple rules, its elegant solution and its historical importance is the quintessence of a combinatorial game, which is why it led to so many generalizations and modifications. We present a modification with a new spin: building nim. With given finite numbers of tokens and stacks, this two-player game is played in two stages (thus belonging to the same family of games as e.g. nine-men's morris): first building, where players alternate to put one token on one of the, initially empty, stacks until all tokens have been used. Then, the players play nim. Of course, because the solution for the game of nim is known, the goal of the player who starts nim play is a placement of the tokens so that the Nim-sum of the stack heights at the end of building is different from 0. This game is trivial if the total number of tokens is odd as the Nim-sum could never be 0, or if both the number of tokens and the number of stacks are even, since a simple mimicking strategy results in a Nim-sum of 0 after each of the second player's moves. We present the solution for this game for some non-trivial cases and state a general conjecture.

Duch\^ene and Rigo introduced the notion of invariance for take-away games on heaps. Roughly speaking, these are games whose rulesets do not depend on the position. Given a sequence $S$ of positive tuples of integers, the question of whether there exists an invariant game having $S$ as set of $\mathcal{P}$-positions is relevant. In particular, it was recently proved by Larsson et al. that if $S$ is a pair of complementary Beatty sequences, then the answer to this question is always positive. In this paper, we show that for a fairly large set of sequences (expressed by infinite words), the answer to this question is decidable.

We characterize all the pairs of complementary non-homogenous Beatty sequences $(A_n)_{n\ge 0}$ and $(B_n)_{n\ge 0}$ for which there exists an invariant game having exactly $\{(A_n,B_n)\mid n\ge 0\}\cup \{(B_n,A_n)\mid n\ge 0\}$ as set of $\mathcal{P}$-positions. Using the notion of Sturmian word and tools arising in symbolic dynamics and combinatorics on words, this characterization can be translated to a decision procedure relying only on a few algebraic tests about algebraicity or rational independence. Given any four real numbers defining the two sequences, up to these tests, we can therefore decide whether or not such an invariant game exists., Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures

Given a graph G with positive integer weights on the vertices, and a token placed on some current vertex u, two players alternately remove a positive integer weight from u and then move the token to a new current vertex adjacent to u. When the weight of a vertex is set to 0, it is removed and its neighborhood becomes a clique. The player making the last move wins. This adaptation of Nim on graphs is called Vertexnim, and slightly differs from the game Vertex NimG introduced by Stockman in 2004. Vertexnim can be played on both directed or undirected graphs. In this paper, we study the complexity of deciding whether a given game position of Vertexnim is winning for the first or second player. In particular, we show that for undirected graphs, this problem can be solved in quadratic time. Our algorithm is also available for the game Vertex NimG, thus improving Stockman's exptime algorithm. In the directed case, we are able to compute the winning strategy in polynomial time for several instances, including circuits or digraphs with self loops.

Coloring games are combinatorial games where the players alternate painting uncolored vertices of a graph one of $k > 0$ colors. Each different ruleset specifies that game's coloring constraints. This paper investigates six impartial rulesets (five new), derived from previously-studied graph coloring schemes, including proper map coloring, oriented coloring, 2-distance coloring, weak coloring, and sequential coloring. For each, we study the outcome classes for special cases and general computational complexity. In some cases we pay special attention to the Grundy function.