Tootfinder

Viewfinder (Multi, XPd on PC) Inside a "holodeck" of some kind, use photos, paintings, screenshots, etc to change the world you're exploring, while looking for the much needed research to fix the outside world.
Finally something other than a sim game, lol. This is a really good puzzle adventure/walking.. sim 🤣 with a really neat hook. Any picture you can pick up (and later take) you can "plant" in the scene to alter the world, allowing you to solve the puzzles a…

Resource-Splitting Games with Tullock-Based Lossy Contests
Marko Maljkovic, Gustav Nilsson, Nikolas Geroliminis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13853 https://…

Resource-Splitting Games with Tullock-Based Lossy Contests
This paper introduces a novel class of multi-stage resource allocation games that model real-world scenarios in which profitability depends on the balance between supply and demand, and where higher resource investment leads to greater returns. Our proposed framework, which incorporates the notion of profit loss due to insufficient player participation, gives rise to a Tullock-like functional form of the stage payoff structure when weighted fair proportional resource allocation is applied. We e…

Democratizing Game Modding with GenAI: A Case Study of StarCharM, a Stardew Valley Character Maker
Hamid Zand Miralvand, Mohammad Ronagh Nikghalb, Mohammad Darandeh, Abidullah Khan, Ian Arawjo, Jinghui Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13951

Democratizing Game Modding with GenAI: A Case Study of StarCharM, a Stardew Valley Character Maker
Game modding offers unique and personalized gaming experiences, but the technical complexity of creating mods often limits participation to skilled users. We envision a future where every player can create personalized mods for their games. To explore this space, we designed StarCharM, a GenAI-based non-player character (NPC) creator for Stardew Valley. Our tool enables players to iteratively create new NPC mods, requiring minimal user input while allowing for fine-grained adjustments through u…

'Best back' in NFL? Taylor adds 3 more TDs to case https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46654784/jonathan-taylor-notches-another-td-hat-trick-colts-win

4-uniform Maker-Breaker and Maker-Maker games are PSPACE-complete
Florian Galliot
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13819 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13819

4-uniform Maker-Breaker and Maker-Maker games are PSPACE-complete
We study two positional games where two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex of a hypergraph $H$. We say a player fills an edge of $H$ if that player has picked all the vertices of that edge. In the Maker-Maker game, whoever first fills an edge wins, or we get a draw if no edge is filled. In the Maker-Breaker game, the first player aims at filling an edge while the second player aims at preventing the first player from filling an edge. We show that, for both games, deciding w…

The Cowboys' 2025 season hinges on 1 player: Dak Prescott https://insidethestar.com/the-cowboys-2025-season-hinges-on-1-player-dak-prescott

Tight Regret Upper and Lower Bounds for Optimistic Hedge in Two-Player Zero-Sum Games
Taira Tsuchiya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11691 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Tight Regret Upper and Lower Bounds for Optimistic Hedge in Two-Player Zero-Sum Games
In two-player zero-sum games, the learning dynamic based on optimistic Hedge achieves one of the best-known regret upper bounds among strongly-uncoupled learning dynamics. With an appropriately chosen learning rate, the social and individual regrets can be bounded by $O(\log(mn))$ in terms of the numbers of actions $m$ and $n$ of the two players. This study investigates the optimality of the dependence on $m$ and $n$ in the regret of optimistic Hedge. To this end, we begin by refining existing …

Generalised Reachability Games Revisited
Sougata Bose (UMONS - Universit\'e de Mons), Daniel Hausmann (University of Liverpool), Soumyajit Paul (University of Liverpool), Sven Schewe (University of Liverpool), Tansholpan Zhanabekova (University of Liverpool)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14091

Generalised Reachability Games Revisited
Classic reachability games on graphs are zero-sum games, where the goal of one player, Eve, is to visit a vertex from a given target set, and that of other player, Adam, is to prevent this. Generalised reachability games, studied by Fijalkow and Horn, are a generalisation of reachability objectives, where instead of a single target set, there is a family of target sets and Eve must visit all of them in any order. In this work, we further study the complexity of solving two-player games on graph…

NFL Week 3 injury report: Player statuses for all 16 games https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-week-3-injury-report-player-statuses-2025-season

Quantum Deception: Honey-X Deception using Quantum Games
Efstratios Reppas, Ali Wadi, Brendan Gould, Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11848 https://

Quantum Deception: Honey-X Deception using Quantum Games
In this paper, we develop a framework for deception in quantum games, extending the Honey-X paradigm from classical zero-sum settings into the quantum domain. Building on a view of deception in classical games as manipulation of a player's perception of the payoff matrix, we formalize quantum deception as controlled perturbations of the payoff Hamiltonian subject to a deception budget. We show that when victims are aware of possible deception, their equilibrium strategies surprisingly coincide …

The Game of Graph Nim on graphs with four edges
Sayar Karmakar, Moumanti Podder, Souvik Roy, Soumyarup Sadhukhan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05064 https://a…

The Game of Graph Nim on graphs with four edges
This work is concerned with the study of the Game of Graph Nim -- a class of two-player combinatorial games -- on graphs with $4$ edges. To each edge of such a graph is assigned a positive-integer-valued edge-weight, and during each round of the game, the player whose turn it is to make a move selects a vertex, and removes a non-negative integer edge-weight from each of the edges incident on that vertex, such that the remaining edge-weight on each of these edges is a non-negative integer, and t…

⚾ Sports teams appear to provide less injury protection for players with temporary contracts
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-sports-teams-injury-players-temporary.html

Sports teams appear to provide less injury protection for players with temporary contracts
Research in Economic Inquiry reveals that Major League Baseball teams appear to manage player injuries differently depending on contract status, with players on temporary contracts missing significantly fewer games due to injury. This suggests that teams may invest less in the long-term health of non-permanent players.

So arguably the Pac-Man ghost logic is the exact opposite of “AI”.
It’s extremely well defined behavior based on very basic deterministic algorithms that are so simple a 8-year old player can understand them and anticipate them correctly for those high-scores.
The game actually is famous for the simple enemy logic and studied by games designers for it.
Pac-Man enemy behavior:
deterministic, well-defined algorithm that can easily be executed on the most primitive* computer hardware
“AI”:
black-box algorithm with indeterministic behavior that requires a metric shitload of compute
—
*By “primitive computer hardware” I mean that the Pac-Man arcade machine runs on a Zilog Z80 CPU with 8,500 transistors.The CPU in the phone you are reading this on has (latest iPhone as example) 15 billion transistors or so (almost 2 million times more) and runs tens of thousands of times faster.

Mario Kart 7: back online
With the help of the Pretendo network, I've managed to have a few games of this online over the past week or so, as well as doing some more time trials. The lobbies aren't full, but any stretch, but even when there's only three people in a race the catch up algorithms mean that it's fun to compete. On a couple of occasions there was one player who knew glitches on levels which meant they won easily, but they never stayed online for long.
…

From tug-of-war to Brownian Boost: explicit ODE solutions for player-funded stochastic-differential games
Alan Hammond
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07682 https://

From tug-of-war to Brownian Boost: explicit ODE solutions for player-funded stochastic-differential games
Brownian Boost is a one-parameter family of stochastic differential games played on the real line in which players spend at rates of their choosing in an ongoing effort to influence the drift of a randomly diffusing point particle~$X$. One or other player is rewarded, at time infinity, according to whether~$X$ tends to plus or minus infinity. Each player's net receipt is the final reward (only for the victor) minus the player's total spend. We characterise and explicitly compute the time-homoge…

NFL Week 7 injury report: Player statuses for all 15 games https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-week-7-injury-report-player-statuses-for-all-15-games

Two-Person Additively-Separable Sum Games
Somdeb Lahiri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19325 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19325

Two-Person Additively-Separable Sum Games
We consider a subclass of bimatrix games which we refer to as two person additively separable sum games, where the sum of the payoffs of the two players is additively separable. The payoff to the row player at each pair of pure strategies, is the sum of two numbers, the first of which may be dependent on the pure strategy chosen by the column player and the second being independent of the pure strategy chosen by the column player. The payoff to the column player at each pair of pure strategies,…

Deciding the Value of Two-Clock Almost Non-Zeno Weighted Timed Games
Isa Vialard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00014 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00014

Deciding the Value of Two-Clock Almost Non-Zeno Weighted Timed Games
The Value Problem for weighted timed games (wtgs) consists in determining, given a two-player weighted timed game with a reachability objective and a rational threshold, whether or not the value of the game exceeds the threshold. When restrained to wtgs with non-negative weight, this problem is known to be undecidable for weighted timed games with three or more clocks, and decidable for one-clock wtgs. The Value Problem for two-clock non-negative wtgs, which remained stubbornly open for a decad…

Strategic Concealment of Environment Representations in Competitive Games
Yue Guan, Dipankar Maity, Panagiotis Tsiotras
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05503 https://

Strategic Concealment of Environment Representations in Competitive Games
This paper investigates the strategic concealment of map abstractions used by the players in competitive games. We consider a defense scenario in which one player (the Defender) seeks to infer and exploit the abstraction used by the other player (the Attacker). The interaction between the two players is modeled as a Bayesian game: the Defender selects a barrier configuration, i.e., a placement of obstacles that can obstruct the Attacker's movement, based on its belief about the Attacker's abstr…

Binary Choice Games and Arithmetical Comprehension
Juan Pablo Aguilera, Thibaut Kouptchinsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12612 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12…

Binary Choice Games and Arithmetical Comprehension
We prove that Arithmetical Comprehension is equivalent to the determinacy of all clopen integer games in which each player has at most two moves per turn.

Guess your neighbor's input: Quantum advantage in Feige's game
Simon Schmidt, Sigurd A. L. Storgaard, Michael Walter, Yuming Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08484 https:…

Guess your neighbor's input: Quantum advantage in Feige's game
In this article, we study a nonlocal game with two questions and three answers per player, which was first considered by Feige in 1991, and show that there is quantum advantage in this game. We prove that the game is a robust self-test for the $3$-dimensional maximally entangled state. Furthermore, we show that the game can be seen as the "or" of two games that each do not have quantum advantage. Lastly, we investigate the behavior of the game with respect to parallel repetition in the classica…

Hybrid Game Control Envelope Synthesis
Aditi Kabra, Jonathan Laurent, Stefan Mitsch, Andr\'e Platzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05997 https://arxiv.org…

Hybrid Game Control Envelope Synthesis
Control problems for embedded systems like cars and trains can be modeled by two-player hybrid games. Control envelopes, which are families of safe control solutions, correspond to nondeterministic winning policies of hybrid games, where each deterministic specialization of the policy is a control solution. This paper synthesizes nondeterministic winning policies for hybrid games that are as permissive as possible. It introduces subvalue maps, a compositional representation of such policies tha…

PuzzlePlex: Benchmarking Foundation Models on Reasoning and Planning with Puzzles
Yitao Long, Yuru Jiang, Hongjun Liu, Yilun Zhao, Jingchen Sun, Yiqiu Shen, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan, Dennis Shasha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06475

PuzzlePlex: Benchmarking Foundation Models on Reasoning and Planning with Puzzles
This work investigates the reasoning and planning capabilities of foundation models and their scalability in complex, dynamic environments. We introduce PuzzlePlex, a benchmark designed to assess these capabilities through a diverse set of puzzles. PuzzlePlex consists of 15 types of puzzles, including deterministic and stochastic games of varying difficulty, as well as single-player and two-player scenarios. The PuzzlePlex framework provides a comprehensive environment for each game, and suppor…

On the Complexity of Stationary Nash Equilibria in Discounted Perfect Information Stochastic Games
Kristoffer Arnsfelt Hansen, Xinhao Nie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11550 https:…

On the Complexity of Stationary Nash Equilibria in Discounted Perfect Information Stochastic Games
We study the problem of computing stationary Nash equilibria in discounted perfect information stochastic games from the viewpoint of computational complexity. For two-player games we prove the problem to be in PPAD, which together with a previous PPAD-hardness result precisely classifies the problem as PPAD-complete. In addition to this we give an improved and simpler PPAD-hardness proof for computing a stationary epsilon-Nash equilibrium. For 3-player games we construct games showing that rat…

Combinatorial games and the golden ratio on digraphs
Tomoaki Abuku, Hiroki Inazu, Hiyu Inoue, Shun-ichi Kimura, Koki Suetsugu, Kosaku Watanabe, Takahiro Yamashita
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04943

Combinatorial games and the golden ratio on digraphs
We introduce a new combinatorial game, named Triangle Game. In this game, a directed $3$-cycle graph is given, and tokens are placed on each vertex. The player chooses an edge and takes at least one token from the initial vertex. At the same time, the player is allowed to return some tokens to the terminal vertex of the edge, as far as the total number of the tokens decreases. We describe the set of \Pps~under both normal play and misère play. The golden ratio $ϕ=\dfrac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2}$ plays …

Good Morning #Canada
#HappyBirthday to William Eldon O'Ree, born October 15, 1935, in Fredericton New Brunswick. O'Ree is recognized for being the first black player in the National Hockey League, playing as a winger for the Boston Bruins. His accomplishment of breaking the colour barrier in the NHL has led him to sometimes be referred to as the "Jackie Robinson of hockey." But O'Ree's legacy goes well beyond the small number of games he played in the NHL. He has spent his non-playing days as an ambassador for hockey and focused on diversity and expanding the audience for the sport. His post hockey career is undoubtedly why he has collected so many honors and awards.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianHeroes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_O'Ree

On Convergence Rates of General $N$-Player Stackelberg Games to their Mean Field Limits
Alain Bensoussan, Ziyu Huang, Sheng Wang, Sheung Chi Phillip Yam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02380

On Convergence Rates of General $N$-Player Stackelberg Games to their Mean Field Limits
In this article, we establish precise convergence rates of a general class of $N$-Player Stackelberg games to their mean field limits, which allows the response time delay of information, empirical distribution based interactions, and the control-dependent diffusion coefficients. All these features makes our problem nonstandard, barely been touched in the literature, and they complicate the analysis and therefore reduce the convergence rate. We first justify the same convergence rate for both t…

Enjoyed the demo for Die For The Lich. I've really enjoyed the design space of dice in video games (Dicey Dungeons, DICEOMANCER, Duck and Roll). Similar to cards, they provide explicit input randomness, but you think a lot more about probabilities and sums.
The game feels pretty streamlined, but open to a lot of depth as you earn more dice and trinkets (which you draw like dice).
#Games

Betting guide: Saquon comes to life, Josh Jacobs keeps rolling https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/46617685/week-7-nfl-odds-spreads-lines-props-best-bets-sunday-football-games

How LLMs are Shaping the Future of Virtual Reality
S\"ueda \"Ozkaya, Santiago Berrezueta-Guzman, Stefan Wagner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00737 https://

How LLMs are Shaping the Future of Virtual Reality
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Virtual Reality (VR) games marks a paradigm shift in the design of immersive, adaptive, and intelligent digital experiences. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent research at the intersection of LLMs and VR, examining how these models are transforming narrative generation, non-player character (NPC) interactions, accessibility, personalization, and game mastering. Drawing from an analysis of 62 peer reviewed studies published b…

Raiders Defender Doesn’t Hold Back on Bears’ Rome Odunze https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/las-vegas-defender-bears-rome-odunze/?adt_ei=[email]

Constructions for positional games and applications to domination games
Ali Deniz Bagdas, Dennis Clemens, Fabian Hamann, Yannick Mogge
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05089 https://

Constructions for positional games and applications to domination games
We present constructions regarding the general behaviour of biased positional games, and amongst others show that the outcome of such a game can differ in an arbitrary way depending on which player starts the game, and that fair biased games can behave highly non-monotonic. We construct a gadget that helps to transfer such results to Maker-Breaker domination games, and by this we extend a recent result by Gledel, Iršič, and Klavžar, regarding the length of such games. Additionally, we introd…

Optimal Strategies to Catch Randomly Walking Cat
R\"udiger Jehn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18276 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18276

Optimal Strategies to Catch Randomly Walking Cat
The optimal strategies to catch a randomly walking cat in various environments are presented. All games have a player that opens a box at step $i$. If the cat is in this box the player wins, if not, the cat moves randomly to an adjacent box, or in case the box is open to the outside, the cat may escape. If the cat is not escaping, the next step of the game is played. In case the cat has doors to escape, the optimal strategy is determined that minimizes the escape chances of the cat. If there ar…

ChatGPT (cat, I farted, to the French) can't beat the world's best chess player, and it sucks at old video games, mainly because ChatGPT is NOT INTELLIGENCE of ANY kind. It's a parrot machine.

Deep Hedging Under Non-Convexity: Limitations and a Case for AlphaZero
Matteo Maggiolo, Giuseppe Nuti, Miroslav \v{S}trupl, Oleg Szehr
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01874 https://

Deep Hedging Under Non-Convexity: Limitations and a Case for AlphaZero
This paper examines replication portfolio construction in incomplete markets - a key problem in financial engineering with applications in pricing, hedging, balance sheet management, and energy storage planning. We model this as a two-player game between an investor and the market, where the investor makes strategic bets on future states while the market reveals outcomes. Inspired by the success of Monte Carlo Tree Search in stochastic games, we introduce an AlphaZero-based system and compare i…

Asymmetric Network Games: $\alpha$-Potential Function and Learning
Kiran Rokade, Adit Jain, Francesca Parise, Vikram Krishnamurthy, Eva Tardos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06619 h…

Asymmetric Network Games: $α$-Potential Function and Learning
In a network game, players interact over a network and the utility of each player depends on his own action and on an aggregate of his neighbours' actions. Many real world networks of interest are asymmetric and involve a large number of heterogeneous players. This paper analyzes static network games using the framework of $α$-potential games. Under mild assumptions on the action sets (compact intervals) and the utility functions (twice continuously differentiable) of the players, we derive an…

A Modular Algorithm for Non-Stationary Online Convex-Concave Optimization
Qing-xin Meng, Xia Lei, Jian-wei Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07901 https://arx…

A Modular Algorithm for Non-Stationary Online Convex-Concave Optimization
This paper investigates the problem of Online Convex-Concave Optimization, which extends Online Convex Optimization to two-player time-varying convex-concave games. The goal is to minimize the dynamic duality gap (D-DGap), a critical performance measure that evaluates players' strategies against arbitrary comparator sequences. Existing algorithms fail to deliver optimal performance, particularly in stationary or predictable environments. To address this, we propose a novel modular algorithm wit…

Mean Field Games of Controls with Dirichlet \& Neumann Boundary Conditions
P. Jameson Graber, Kyle Rosengartner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21642 https://

Mean Field Games of Controls with Dirichlet \& Neumann Boundary Conditions
In a mean field game of controls, a large population of identical players seek to minimize a cost that depends on the joint distribution of the states of the players and their controls. We consider the classes of mean field games of controls in which the value function and the distribution of player states satisfy either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions. We prove that such systems are well-posed either with sufficient smallness conditions or in the case of monotone couplings.

Sensitivity-Driven Migration and the Evolution of Cooperation in Multi-Player Games on Structured Populations
Dhaker Kroumi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01126 https://

Sensitivity-Driven Migration and the Evolution of Cooperation in Multi-Player Games on Structured Populations
Cooperation often depends on individuals avoiding exploitation and interacting preferentially with other cooperators. We explore how context-dependent migration influences the evolution of cooperation in spatially structured populations. Individuals interact in small groups through public goods games and reproduce with possible dispersal. Cooperators migrate more frequently when surrounded by defectors, while defectors disperse uniformly. This behavioral asymmetry reflects realistic differences…

NFL Week 2 injury report: Player statuses for all 16 games https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-week-2-injury-report-player-statuses-2025-season

Maker playing against an invisible Breaker
Dennis Clemens, Fabian Hamann, Mirjana Mikala\v{c}ki, Yannick Mogge, Milo\v{s} Stojakovi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22519 https…

Maker playing against an invisible Breaker
We initiate the study of the phantom version of Maker-Breaker positional games. In a phantom game, the moves of one of the players are hidden from the other player, who still has the complete information. We look at the biased $(a:b)$ Maker-PhantomBreaker games where the board is the edge set of the complete graph on $n$ vertices, $K_n$, and Maker has no information about PhantomBreaker's choices of edges. We give randomized strategies for both players in four classical games: connectivity game…

Actively Learning to Coordinate in Convex Games via Approximate Correlated Equilibrium
Zhenlong Fang, Aryan Deshwal, Yue Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10989 https://

Actively Learning to Coordinate in Convex Games via Approximate Correlated Equilibrium
Correlated equilibrium generalizes Nash equilibrium by allowing a central coordinator to guide players' actions through shared recommendations, similar to how routing apps guide drivers. We investigate how a coordinator can learn a correlated equilibrium in convex games where each player minimizes a convex cost function that depends on other players' actions, subject to convex constraints without knowledge of the players' cost functions. We propose a learning framework that learns an approximat…

Finite-Horizon Partially Observable Semi-Markov Games with Risk Probability Criteria
Xin Wen, Li Xia, Zhihui Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17791 https://ar…

Finite-Horizon Partially Observable Semi-Markov Games with Risk Probability Criteria
This paper studies partially observable two-person zero-sum semi-Markov games under a probability criterion, in which the system state may not be completely observed. It focuses on the probability that the accumulated rewards of player 1 (i.e., the incurred costs of player 2) fall short of a specified target at the terminal stage, which represents the risk of player 1 and the capacity of player 2. We study the game model via the technology of augmenting state space with the joint conditional di…

SpinGPT: A Large-Language-Model Approach to Playing Poker Correctly
Narada Maugin, Tristan Cazenave
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22387 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

SpinGPT: A Large-Language-Model Approach to Playing Poker Correctly
The Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) algorithm and its variants have enabled the development of pokerbots capable of beating the best human players in heads-up (1v1) cash games and competing with them in six-player formats. However, CFR's computational complexity rises exponentially with the number of players. Furthermore, in games with three or more players, following Nash equilibrium no longer guarantees a non-losing outcome. These limitations, along with others, significantly restric…

NFL Week 1 injury report: Player statuses for all 16 games https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-week-1-injury-report-player-statuses-for-all-16-games-2025-season

Quantitative convergence for displacement monotone Mean Field Games of control
Joe Jackson, Alp\'ar R. M\'esz\'aros
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17014 https://

Quantitative convergence for displacement monotone Mean Field Games of control
In this paper we establish quantitative convergence results for both open and closed-loop Nash equilibria of N-player stochastic differential games in the setting of Mean Field Games of Controls (MFGC), a class of models where interactions among agents occur through both states and controls. Our analysis covers a general class of non-separable Hamiltonians satisfying a displacement monotonicity condition, along with mild regularity and growth conditions at infinity. A major novelty of our work …

Balanced player arrangement in rotating court games
Alessandro Danelon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23884 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23884

Balanced player arrangement in rotating court games
Consider a game involving a team with $n$ players, $k$ of which wear shirts marked with a letter $A$, while the others with a letter $B$, and such that only $s$ people play, while the remaining $n-s$ wait outside the court. At certain times the players rotate, and one player enters the court while another one leaves, each player keeping the same neighbors at all times. The house rules want at least $t$ players wearing a shirt with the letter $A$ in the court at each rotation. We show that this …

Team Variance Optimization of n-Player Stochastic Games with Separately Controlled Chains
Li Xia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22335 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Team Variance Optimization of n-Player Stochastic Games with Separately Controlled Chains
In this paper, we study a subclass of n-player stochastic games, in which each player has their own internal state controlled only by their own action and their objective is a common goal called team variance which measures the total variation of the random rewards of all players. It is assumed that players cannot observe each others' state/action. Thus, players' internal chains are controlled separately by their own action and they are coupled through the objective of team variance. Since the …

Where are the Frontlines? A Visualization Approach for Map Control in Team-Based Games
Jonas Pech\'e, Aliaksei Tsishurou, Alexander Zap, Guenter Wallner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19193

Where are the Frontlines? A Visualization Approach for Map Control in Team-Based Games
A central area of interest in many competitive online games is spatial behavior which due to its complexity can be difficult to visualize. Such behaviors of interest include not only overall movement patterns but also being able to understand which player or team is exerting control over an area to inform decision-making. Map control can, however, be challenging to quantify. In this paper, we propose a method for calculating frontlines and first efforts towards a visualization of them. The visu…

Chargers WR Keenan Allen becomes fastest player in NFL history to 1,000 receptions https://www.nfl.com/news/chargers-wr-keenan-allen-becomes-fastest-player-in-nfl-history-to-1-000-receptions

On the $O(1/T)$ Convergence of Alternating Gradient Descent-Ascent in Bilinear Games
Tianlong Nan, Shuvomoy Das Gupta, Garud Iyengar, Christian Kroer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03855

On the $O(1/T)$ Convergence of Alternating Gradient Descent-Ascent in Bilinear Games
We study the alternating gradient descent-ascent (AltGDA) algorithm in two-player zero-sum games. Alternating methods, where players take turns to update their strategies, have long been recognized as simple and practical approaches for learning in games, exhibiting much better numerical performance than their simultaneous counterparts. However, our theoretical understanding of alternating algorithms remains limited, and results are mostly restricted to the unconstrained setting. We show that f…

NFL Week 5 injury report: Player statuses for all 14 games https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-week-5-injury-report-player-statuses-for-all-14-games

Choose Your Battles: Distributed Learning Over Multiple Tug of War Games
Siddharth Chandak, Ilai Bistritz, Nicholas Bambos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20147 https://

Choose Your Battles: Distributed Learning Over Multiple Tug of War Games
Consider N players and K games taking place simultaneously. Each of these games is modeled as a Tug-of-War (ToW) game where increasing the action of one player decreases the reward for all other players. Each player participates in only one game at any given time. At each time step, a player decides the game in which they wish to participate in and the action they take in that game. Their reward depends on the actions of all players that are in the same game. This system of K games is termed `M…

Using Generative AI to Uncover What Drives Player Enjoyment in PC and VR Games
Hisham Abdelqader
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16596 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Using Generative AI to Uncover What Drives Player Enjoyment in PC and VR Games
As video games continue to evolve, understanding what drives player enjoyment remains a key challenge. Player reviews provide valuable insights, but their unstructured nature makes large-scale analysis difficult. This study applies generative AI and machine learning, leveraging Microsoft Phi-4 LLM and XGBoost, to quantify and analyze game reviews from Steam and Meta Quest stores. The approach converts qualitative feedback into structured data, enabling comprehensive evaluation of key game desig…

Last-Iterate Convergence in Adaptive Regret Minimization for Approximate Extensive-Form Perfect Equilibrium
Hang Ren, Xiaozhen Sun, Tianzi Ma, Jiajia Zhang, Xuan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07699

Last-Iterate Convergence in Adaptive Regret Minimization for Approximate Extensive-Form Perfect Equilibrium
The Nash Equilibrium (NE) assumes rational play in imperfect-information Extensive-Form Games (EFGs) but fails to ensure optimal strategies for off-equilibrium branches of the game tree, potentially leading to suboptimal outcomes in practical settings. To address this, the Extensive-Form Perfect Equilibrium (EFPE), a refinement of NE, introduces controlled perturbations to model potential player errors. However, existing EFPE-finding algorithms, which typically rely on average strategy converge…

Efficient Kernelized Learning in Polyhedral Games Beyond Full-Information: From Colonel Blotto to Congestion Games
Andreas Kontogiannis, Vasilis Pollatos, Gabriele Farina, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Ioannis Panageas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20919

Efficient Kernelized Learning in Polyhedral Games Beyond Full-Information: From Colonel Blotto to Congestion Games
We examine the problem of efficiently learning coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in polyhedral games, that is, normal-form games with an exponentially large number of actions per player and an underlying combinatorial structure. Prominent examples of such games are the classical Colonel Blotto and congestion games. To achieve computational efficiency, the learning algorithms must exhibit regret and per-iteration complexity that scale polylogarithmically in the size of the players' action sets.…

NFL Week 4 injury report: Player statuses for all 16 games https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-week-4-injury-report-player-statuses-2025-season

Maximizing Social Welfare with Side Payments
Ivan Geffner, Caspar Oesterheld, Vincent Conitzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07147 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

Maximizing Social Welfare with Side Payments
We examine normal-form games in which players may \emph{pre-commit} to outcome-contingent transfers before choosing their actions. In the one-shot version of this model, Jackson and Wilkie showed that side contracting can backfire: even a game with a Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium can devolve into inefficient equilibria once unbounded, simultaneous commitments are allowed. The root cause is a prisoner's dilemma effect, where each player can exploit her commitment power to reshape the equilibri…

Capital Games and Growth Equilibria
Ben Abramowitz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00472 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00472

Capital Games and Growth Equilibria
We examine formal games that we call "capital games" in which player payoffs are known, but their payoffs are not guaranteed to be von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities. In capital games, the dynamics of player payoffs determine their utility functions. Different players can have different payoff dynamics. We make no assumptions about where these dynamics come from, but implicitly assume that they come from the players' actions and interactions over time. We define an equilibrium concept called "gr…

A New Three-Players Auction Bridge with Dynamic Opponents and Team Members
Sourish Sarkar, Aritrabha Majumdar, Moutushi Chatterjee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05582 https://

A New Three-Players Auction Bridge with Dynamic Opponents and Team Members
This article presents a new three-player version of the bridge playing card game for the purpose of ending fixed partnerships so that the play can be more dynamic and flexible. By dynamically redefining team makeup in real time, this game design increases unpredictability and forces players to repeatedly update strategy. A novel scoring system is introduced to reduce biases present in conventional rule-based games by favoring fairness via reward systems that enforce tactical decision making and…

Slavic Techniques for Hat Guessing Algorithms
I. M. J. McInnis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21487 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21487

Slavic Techniques for Hat Guessing Algorithms
2023 undergraduate thesis on a deterministic "hat game." For a digraph $D$, each player stands on a vertex $v$, is assigned a hat from $h(v)$ possible colors, and makes $g(v)$ guesses of her hat's color based on her out-neighbors' hats. If there exists a collective strategy that guarantees a correct guess for any hat assignment, the game is winnable. Which games $(D,g,h)$ are winnable? Two much-studied parameters: $μ(D)$ is the maximum integer $k$ such that $(D,1,k)$ is winnable, and $\hatμ(D…

A Novel Framework for Honey-X Deception in Zero-Sum Games
Brendan Gould, Kyriakos Vamvoudakis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20329 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.2…

A Novel Framework for Honey-X Deception in Zero-Sum Games
In this paper, we present a novel, game-theoretic model of deception in two-player, zero-sum games. Our framework leverages an information asymmetry: one player (the deceiver) has access to accurate payoff information, while the other (the victim) observes a modified version of these payoffs due to the deception strategy employed. The deceiver's objective is to choose a deception-action pair that optimally exploits the victim's best response to the altered payoffs, subject to a constraint on th…

M\"obius transforms and Shapley values for vector-valued functions on weighted directed acyclic multigraphs
Patrick Forr\'e, Abel Jansma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05786

Möbius transforms and Shapley values for vector-valued functions on weighted directed acyclic multigraphs
We generalize the concept of Möbius inversion and Shapley values to directed acyclic multigraphs and weighted versions thereof. We further allow value functions (games) and thus their Möbius transforms (synergy function) and Shapley values to have values in any abelian group that is a module over a ring that contains the graph weights, e.g. vector-valued functions. To achieve this and overcome the obstruction that the classical axioms (linearity, efficiency, null player, symmetry) are not str…

Deceptive Planning Exploiting Inattention Blindness
Mustafa O. Karabag, Jesse Milzman, Ufuk Topcu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02714 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Deceptive Planning Exploiting Inattention Blindness
We study decision-making with rational inattention in settings where agents have perception constraints. In such settings, inaccurate prior beliefs or models of others may lead to inattention blindness, where an agent is unaware of its incorrect beliefs. We model this phenomenon in two-player zero-sum stochastic games, where Player 1 has perception constraints and Player 2 deceptively deviates from its security policy presumed by Player 1 to gain an advantage. We formulate the perception constr…

Limit-Computable Grains of Truth for Arbitrary Computable Extensive-Form (Un)Known Games
Cole Wyeth, Marcus Hutter, Jan Leike, Jessica Taylor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16245 ht…

Limit-Computable Grains of Truth for Arbitrary Computable Extensive-Form (Un)Known Games
A Bayesian player acting in an infinite multi-player game learns to predict the other players' strategies if his prior assigns positive probability to their play (or contains a grain of truth). Kalai and Lehrer's classic grain of truth problem is to find a reasonably large class of strategies that contains the Bayes-optimal policies with respect to this class, allowing mutually-consistent beliefs about strategy choice that obey the rules of Bayesian inference. Only small classes are known to ha…

Learning with Episodic Hypothesis Testing in General Games: A Framework for Equilibrium Selection
Ruifan Yang, Manxi Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23149 https://

Learning with Episodic Hypothesis Testing in General Games: A Framework for Equilibrium Selection
We introduce a new hypothesis testing-based learning dynamics in which players update their strategies by combining hypothesis testing with utility-driven exploration. In this dynamics, each player forms beliefs about opponents' strategies and episodically tests these beliefs using empirical observations. Beliefs are resampled either when the hypothesis test is rejected or through exploration, where the probability of exploration decreases with the player's (transformed) utility. In general fin…

{\epsilon}-Stationary Nash Equilibria in Multi-player Stochastic Graph Games
Ali Asadi, L\'eonard Brice, Krishnendu Chatterjee, K. S. Thejaswini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15356

ε-Stationary Nash Equilibria in Multi-player Stochastic Graph Games
A strategy profile in a multi-player game is a Nash equilibrium if no player can unilaterally deviate to achieve a strictly better payoff. A profile is an $ε$-Nash equilibrium if no player can gain more than $ε$ by unilaterally deviating from their strategy. In this work, we use $ε$-Nash equilibria to approximate the computation of Nash equilibria. Specifically, we focus on turn-based, multiplayer stochastic games played on graphs, where players are restricted to stationary strategies -- str…

A Soft Inducement Framework for Incentive-Aided Steering of No-Regret Players
Asrin Efe Yorulmaz, Raj Kiriti Velicheti, Melih Bastopcu, Tamer Ba\c{s}ar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21672

A Soft Inducement Framework for Incentive-Aided Steering of No-Regret Players
In this work, we investigate a steering problem in a mediator-augmented two-player normal-form game, where the mediator aims to guide players toward a specific action profile through information and incentive design. We first characterize the games for which successful steering is possible. Moreover, we establish that steering players to any desired action profile is not always achievable with information design alone, nor when accompanied with sublinear payment schemes. Consequently, we derive…