Combinatorics Seminar

When: Sunday, January 3, 10am
Where: Schreiber 309
Speaker: Dan Hefetz, ETH Zurich
Title: Give Breaker a break (in an unbiased way)

Abstract:

A Maker-Breaker game on a hypergraph (X,F) is a two player perfect information finite game with no possibility of a draw. The players take turns in claiming one free element of X (the board of the game). Maker wins if and only if he is able to fully claim some element of F. Some Maker-Breaker games are just too easy for Maker. In order to make things more challenging, Chvatal and Erdos have suggested to help Breaker by allowing him to claim more board elements per turn. While this is the most common and highly studied way of helping Breaker, other natural possibilities exist. In this talk I will discuss two such possibilities and will exemplify them by analyzing specific games.

Based on joint works with M. Krivelevich, S. Stojakovic and T. Szabo and with S. Stich.