Partition games

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dailly, Antoine, Duchene, Eric, Larsson, Urban, Paris, Gabrielle
Format: Preprint
Published: 2018
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author Dailly, Antoine
Duchene, Eric
Larsson, Urban
Paris, Gabrielle
author_facet Dailly, Antoine
Duchene, Eric
Larsson, Urban
Paris, Gabrielle
contents We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can perform on a single heap. In normal play, the player with the last move wins, and the famous Sprague-Grundy theory provides a solution. We prove that several rulesets have a periodic or an arithmetic periodic Sprague-Grundy sequence (i.e. they can be partitioned into a finite number of arithmetic progressions of the same common difference). This is achieved directly for some infinite classes of games, and moreover we develop a computational testing condition, demonstrated to solve a variety of additional games. Similar results have previously appeared for various classes of games of take-and-break, for example octal and hexadecimal; see e.g. Winning Ways by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy (1982). In this context, our contribution consists of a systematic study of the subclass `break-without-take'.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1803_02621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2018
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Partition games
Dailly, Antoine
Duchene, Eric
Larsson, Urban
Paris, Gabrielle
Combinatorics
Discrete Mathematics
We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can perform on a single heap. In normal play, the player with the last move wins, and the famous Sprague-Grundy theory provides a solution. We prove that several rulesets have a periodic or an arithmetic periodic Sprague-Grundy sequence (i.e. they can be partitioned into a finite number of arithmetic progressions of the same common difference). This is achieved directly for some infinite classes of games, and moreover we develop a computational testing condition, demonstrated to solve a variety of additional games. Similar results have previously appeared for various classes of games of take-and-break, for example octal and hexadecimal; see e.g. Winning Ways by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy (1982). In this context, our contribution consists of a systematic study of the subclass `break-without-take'.
title Partition games
topic Combinatorics
Discrete Mathematics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02621