General restriction of \((s,t)\)-Wythoff's game (Q405250): Difference between revisions

Wythoff's game is a classical take-away combinatorial game played with two piles of tokens. Fraenkel introduced a generalization of this game, called \((s,t)\)-Wythoff's game where a player may remove a positive number of token from one pile (this is the usual game of Nim) or, remove \(k\) tokens from one pile and simultaneously \(\ell\) tokens from the other pile provided that the following affine condition \(0<k\leq\ell<sk+t\) is fulfilled. In this paper, four restrictions of \((s,t)\)-Wythoff's game (i.e., one has to consider a subset of the original rule-set and play with a restricted set of moves), depending on the parity of the number of tokens that may be removed in a round, are investigated. The authors study both normal and misère conventions. The characterizations of the set of \(P\)-positions of these games are given either in algebraic, recursive form or by explicit formulas. The paper ends with several open problems that may lead to generalizations of the results presented here.