Structure-biased Maker-Breaker Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pegden, Wesley, Yu, Francesca
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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_version_ 1866918036524498944
author Pegden, Wesley
Yu, Francesca
author_facet Pegden, Wesley
Yu, Francesca
contents In classical Maker-Breaker games on graphs, Maker and Breaker take turns claiming edges; Maker's goal is to claim all of some structure (e.g., a spanning tree, Hamilton cycle, etc.), while Breaker aims to stop her. The standard question considered is how powerful a Breaker Maker can defeat; i.e., for the $(1:b)$-biased game where Breaker takes $b$ edges per turn, how large can $b$ be for Maker to still have a winning strategy, for various possible goal sets? We introduce a variant of this question in which Breaker is required to choose their multiple edges as the edges of (a subgraph of) a given structure (e.g., a matching, clique, etc.) on each turn. We establish the order of magnitude of the threshold biases for triangle games, connectivity games, and Hamiltonicity games under clique, matching, and star biases respectively. We conclude that in many cases structure imposes major obstruction to Breaker, opening up a set of games whose strategies deviate from the classical biased Maker-Breaker game strategies, and shedding light on the types of Breaker strategies that may or may not work to prove tighter bounds in the classical setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21306
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structure-biased Maker-Breaker Games
Pegden, Wesley
Yu, Francesca
Combinatorics
91A24 (Primary) 91A46 (Secondary)
In classical Maker-Breaker games on graphs, Maker and Breaker take turns claiming edges; Maker's goal is to claim all of some structure (e.g., a spanning tree, Hamilton cycle, etc.), while Breaker aims to stop her. The standard question considered is how powerful a Breaker Maker can defeat; i.e., for the $(1:b)$-biased game where Breaker takes $b$ edges per turn, how large can $b$ be for Maker to still have a winning strategy, for various possible goal sets? We introduce a variant of this question in which Breaker is required to choose their multiple edges as the edges of (a subgraph of) a given structure (e.g., a matching, clique, etc.) on each turn. We establish the order of magnitude of the threshold biases for triangle games, connectivity games, and Hamiltonicity games under clique, matching, and star biases respectively. We conclude that in many cases structure imposes major obstruction to Breaker, opening up a set of games whose strategies deviate from the classical biased Maker-Breaker game strategies, and shedding light on the types of Breaker strategies that may or may not work to prove tighter bounds in the classical setting.
title Structure-biased Maker-Breaker Games
topic Combinatorics
91A24 (Primary) 91A46 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21306