We study so-called invariant games played with a fixed number d of heaps of
matches. A game is described by a finite list M of integer vectors
of length d specifying the legal moves. A move consists in changing the
current game-state by adding one of the vectors in M, provided all
elements of the resulting vector are nonnegative. For instance, in a two-heap
game, the vector (1,−2) would mean adding one match to the first heap and
removing two matches from the second heap. If (1,−2)∈M, such a
move would be permitted provided there are at least two matches in the second
heap. Two players take turns, and a player unable to make a move loses. We show
that these games embrace computational universality, and that therefore a
number of basic questions about them are algorithmically undecidable. In
particular, we prove that there is no algorithm that takes two games
M and M′ (with the same number of heaps) as input, and
determines whether or not they are equivalent in the sense that every
starting-position which is a first player win in one of the games is a first
player win in the other.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure