Trapping games on random boards

DOI10.1214/16-AAP1190zbMATH Open1356.05088arXiv1505.07485OpenAlexW2563089161MaRDI QIDQ511487FDOQ511487

A. E. Holroyd, Johan Wästlund, James Martin, Riddhipratim Basu

Publication date: 21 February 2017

Published in: The Annals of Applied Probability (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We consider the following two-player game on a graph. A token is located at a vertex, and the players take turns to move it along an edge to a vertex that has not been visited before. A player who cannot move loses. We analyze outcomes with optimal play on percolation clusters of Euclidean lattices. On Z^2 with two different percolation parameters for odd and even sites, we prove that the game has no draws provided closed sites of one parity are sufficiently rare compared with those of the other parity (thus favoring one player). We prove this also for certain d-dimensional lattices with d>=3. It is an open question whether draws can occur when the two parameters are equal. On a finite ball of Z^2, with only odd sites closed but with the external boundary consisting of even sites, we identify up to logarithmic factors a critical window for the trade-off between the size of the ball and the percolation parameter. Outside this window, one or other player has a decisive advantage. Our analysis of the game is intimately tied to the effect of boundary conditions on maximum-cardinality matchings.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07485

zbMATH Keywords

boundary conditionspercolationcombinatorial gamemaximum independent setmaximum matching

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Interacting random processes; statistical mechanics type models; percolation theory (60K35) Extremal problems in graph theory (05C35) 2-person games (91A05) Vertex subsets with special properties (dominating sets, independent sets, cliques, etc.) (05C69) Games on graphs (graph-theoretic aspects) (05C57) Edge subsets with special properties (factorization, matching, partitioning, covering and packing, etc.) (05C70) Games involving graphs (91A43) Combinatorial games (91A46)

Cited In (7)

• Percolation games, probabilistic cellular automata, and the hard-core model
• Biased games on random boards
• Friendly Frogs, Stable Marriage, and the Magic of Invariance
• On a class of PCA with size-3 neighborhood and their applications in percolation games
• Connector-breaker games on random boards
• Galton–Watson games
• Combinatorial games on Galton-Watson trees involving several-generation-jump moves

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