The switch operators and push-the-button games: a sequential compound over rulesets

DOI10.1016/J.TCS.2018.01.003MaRDI QIDQ683756zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors E. Duchêne, Marc Heinrich, Urban Larsson, Aline Parreau

Publication date 9 February 2018

Published in Theoretical Computer Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07966

zbMATH Keywords

combinatorial game Nim Wythoff Nim Euclid's game ruleset compound

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Combinatorial games (91A46)

Abstract: We study operators that combine combinatorial games. This field was initiated by Sprague-Grundy (1930s), Milnor (1950s) and Berlekamp-Conway-Guy (1970-80s) via the now classical disjunctive sum operator on (abstract) games. The new class consists in operators for rulesets, dubbed the switch-operators. The ordered pair of rulesets (R 1 , R 2) is compatible if, given any position in R 1 , there is a description of how to move in R 2. Given compatible (R 1 , R 2), we build the push-the-button game R 1 R 2 , where players start by playing according to the rules R 1 , but at some point during play, one of the players must switch the rules to R 2 , by pushing the button ". Thus, the game ends according to the terminal condition of ruleset R 2. We study the pairwise combinations of the classical rulesets Nim, Wythoff and Euclid. In addition, we prove that standard periodicity results for Subtraction games transfer to this setting, and we give partial results for a variation of Domineering, where R 1 is the game where the players put the domino tiles horizontally and R 2 the game where they play vertically (thus generalizing the octal game 0.07).

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