3,659 research outputs found
Characterising and recognising game-perfect graphs
Consider a vertex colouring game played on a simple graph with
permissible colours. Two players, a maker and a breaker, take turns to colour
an uncoloured vertex such that adjacent vertices receive different colours. The
game ends once the graph is fully coloured, in which case the maker wins, or
the graph can no longer be fully coloured, in which case the breaker wins. In
the game , the breaker makes the first move. Our main focus is on the
class of -perfect graphs: graphs such that for every induced subgraph ,
the game played on admits a winning strategy for the maker with only
colours, where denotes the clique number of .
Complementing analogous results for other variations of the game, we
characterise -perfect graphs in two ways, by forbidden induced subgraphs
and by explicit structural descriptions. We also present a clique module
decomposition, which may be of independent interest, that allows us to
efficiently recognise -perfect graphs.Comment: 39 pages, 8 figures. An extended abstract was accepted at the
International Colloquium on Graph Theory (ICGT) 201
Positional games on random graphs
We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs.
Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability for the
existence of Maker's strategy to claim a member of in the unbiased game
played on the edges of random graph , for various target families
of winning sets. More generally, for each probability above this threshold we
study the smallest bias such that Maker wins the biased game. We
investigate these functions for a number of basic games, like the connectivity
game, the perfect matching game, the clique game and the Hamiltonian cycle
game
Guessing Numbers of Odd Cycles
For a given number of colours, , the guessing number of a graph is the
base logarithm of the size of the largest family of colourings of the
vertex set of the graph such that the colour of each vertex can be determined
from the colours of the vertices in its neighbourhood. An upper bound for the
guessing number of the -vertex cycle graph is . It is known that
the guessing number equals whenever is even or is a perfect
square \cite{Christofides2011guessing}. We show that, for any given integer
, if is the largest factor of less than or equal to
, for sufficiently large odd , the guessing number of with
colours is . This answers a question posed by
Christofides and Markstr\"{o}m in 2011 \cite{Christofides2011guessing}. We also
present an explicit protocol which achieves this bound for every . Linking
this to index coding with side information, we deduce that the information
defect of with colours is for sufficiently
large odd . Our results are a generalisation of the case which was
proven in \cite{bar2011index}.Comment: 16 page
The Computational Complexity of the Game of Set and its Theoretical Applications
The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets
using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round
variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and
establish interesting connections with other classical computational problems.
Specifically, we first show that a natural generalization of the problem of
finding a single Set, parameterized by the size of the sought Set is W-hard;
our reduction applies also to a natural parameterization of Perfect
Multi-Dimensional Matching, a result which may be of independent interest.
Second, we observe that a version of the game where one seeks to find the
largest possible number of disjoint Sets from a given set of cards is a special
case of 3-Set Packing; we establish that this restriction remains NP-complete.
Similarly, the version where one seeks to find the smallest number of disjoint
Sets that overlap all possible Sets is shown to be NP-complete, through a close
connection to the Independent Edge Dominating Set problem. Finally, we study a
2-player version of the game, for which we show a close connection to Arc
Kayles, as well as fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by the
number of rounds played
Shapley Meets Shapley
This paper concerns the analysis of the Shapley value in matching games.
Matching games constitute a fundamental class of cooperative games which help
understand and model auctions and assignments. In a matching game, the value of
a coalition of vertices is the weight of the maximum size matching in the
subgraph induced by the coalition. The Shapley value is one of the most
important solution concepts in cooperative game theory.
After establishing some general insights, we show that the Shapley value of
matching games can be computed in polynomial time for some special cases:
graphs with maximum degree two, and graphs that have a small modular
decomposition into cliques or cocliques (complete k-partite graphs are a
notable special case of this). The latter result extends to various other
well-known classes of graph-based cooperative games.
We continue by showing that computing the Shapley value of unweighted
matching games is #P-complete in general. Finally, a fully polynomial-time
randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) is presented. This FPRAS can be
considered the best positive result conceivable, in view of the #P-completeness
result.Comment: 17 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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