Gardner's Minichess Variant is solved

A 5x5 board is the smallest board on which one can set up all kind of chess pieces as a start position. We consider Gardner's minichess variant in which all pieces are set as in a standard chessboard (from Rook to King). This game has roughly 9x10^{18} legal positions and is comparable in this respect with checkers. We weakly solve this game, that is we prove its game-theoretic value and give a strategy to draw against best play for White and Black sides. Our approach requires surprisingly small computing power. We give a human readable proof. The way the result is obtained is generic and could be generalized to bigger chess settings or to other games

Graph States, Pivot Minor, and Universality of (X,Z)-measurements

The graph state formalism offers strong connections between quantum information processing and graph theory. Exploring these connections, first we show that any graph is a pivot-minor of a planar graph, and even a pivot minor of a triangular grid. Then, we prove that the application of measurements in the (X,Z)-plane over graph states represented by triangular grids is a universal measurement-based model of quantum computation. These two results are in fact two sides of the same coin, the proof of which is a combination of graph theoretical and quantum information techniques

Complexity of Graph State Preparation

The graph state formalism is a useful abstraction of entanglement. It is used in some multipartite purification schemes and it adequately represents universal resources for measurement-only quantum computation. We focus in this paper on the complexity of graph state preparation. We consider the number of ancillary qubits, the size of the primitive operators, and the duration of preparation. For each lexicographic order over these parameters we give upper and lower bounds for the complexity of graph state preparation. The first part motivates our work and introduces basic notions and notations for the study of graph states. Then we study some graph properties of graph states, characterizing their minimal degree by local unitary transformations, we propose an algorithm to reduce the degree of a graph state, and show the relationship with Sutner sigma-game. These properties are used in the last part, where algorithms and lower bounds for each lexicographic order over the considered parameters are presented.Comment: 17 page

Toward Quantum Combinatorial Games

In this paper, we propose a Quantum variation of combinatorial games, generalizing the Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe proposed by Allan Goff. A combinatorial game is a two-player game with no chance and no hidden information, such as Go or Chess. In this paper, we consider the possibility of playing superpositions of moves in such games. We propose different rulesets depending on when superposed moves should be played, and prove that all these rulesets may lead similar games to different outcomes. We then consider Quantum variations of the game of Nim. We conclude with some discussion on the relative interest of the different rulesets

Optimal accessing and non-accessing structures for graph protocols

An accessing set in a graph is a subset B of vertices such that there exists D subset of B, such that each vertex of V\B has an even number of neighbors in D. In this paper, we introduce new bounds on the minimal size kappa'(G) of an accessing set, and on the maximal size kappa(G) of a non-accessing set of a graph G. We show strong connections with perfect codes and give explicitly kappa(G) and kappa'(G) for several families of graphs. Finally, we show that the corresponding decision problems are NP-Complete

Separating pseudo-telepathy games and two-local theories

We give an $\dfrac{1}{54}$ separation between 5-party pseudo-telepathy games and two-local theories. We define the notion of strategy in a k-local theory for a game, and extend the method of Chao and Reichardt. We also study variation of the game to minimize the classical winning probability