96 research outputs found
Avoidance Games Are PSPACE-Complete
Avoidance games are games in which two players claim vertices of a hypergraph and try to avoid some structures. These games are studied since the introduction of the game of SIM in 1968, but only few complexity results are known on them. In 2001, Slany proved some partial results on Avoider-Avoider games complexity, and in 2017 Bonnet et al. proved that short Avoider-Enforcer games are Co-W[1]-hard. More recently, in 2022, Miltzow and Stojakovi\'c proved that these games are NP-hard. As these games corresponds to the mis\`ere version of the well-known Maker-Breaker games, introduced in 1963 and proven PSPACE-complete in 1978, one could expect these games to be PSPACE-complete too, but the question remained open since then. We prove here that both Avoider-Avoider and Avoider-Enforcer conventions are PSPACE-complete, and as a consequence of it that some particular Avoider-Enforcer games also are
Avoider-Enforcer star games
In this paper, we study Avoider-Enforcer games played on the edge
set of the complete graph on vertices. For every constant we
analyse the -star game, where Avoider tries to avoid claiming edges
incident to the same vertex. We analyse both versions of Avoider-Enforcer games
-- the strict and the monotone -- and for each provide explicit winning
strategies for both players. We determine the order of magnitude of the
threshold biases , and
, where is the hypergraph of the game
Fast winning strategies in Avoider-Enforcer games
In numerous positional games the identity of the winner is easily determined.
In this case one of the more interesting questions is not {\em who} wins but
rather {\em how fast} can one win. These type of problems were studied earlier
for Maker-Breaker games; here we initiate their study for unbiased
Avoider-Enforcer games played on the edge set of the complete graph on
vertices. For several games that are known to be an Enforcer's win, we
estimate quite precisely the minimum number of moves Enforcer has to play in
order to win. We consider the non-planarity game, the connectivity game and the
non-bipartite game
Keeping Avoider's graph almost acyclic
We consider biased Avoider-Enforcer games in the monotone and strict
versions. In particular, we show that Avoider can keep his graph being a forest
for every but maybe the last round of the game if . By this
we obtain essentially optimal upper bounds on the threshold biases for the
non-planarity game, the non--colorability game, and the -minor game
thus addressing a question and improving the results of Hefetz, Krivelevich,
Stojakovi\'c, and Szab\'o. Moreover, we give a slight improvement for the lower
bound in the non-planarity game.Comment: 11 page
Positional Games
Positional games are a branch of combinatorics, researching a variety of
two-player games, ranging from popular recreational games such as Tic-Tac-Toe
and Hex, to purely abstract games played on graphs and hypergraphs. It is
closely connected to many other combinatorial disciplines such as Ramsey
theory, extremal graph and set theory, probabilistic combinatorics, and to
computer science. We survey the basic notions of the field, its approaches and
tools, as well as numerous recent advances, standing open problems and
promising research directions.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the ICM 201
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