Combinatorics Seminar

When: Sunday, November 28, 10am
Where: Schreiber 309
Speaker: Dan Hefetz, Tel Aviv University
Title: Playing with boxes

Abstract:

In a seminal paper from 1978, Chvatal and Erdos have introduced biased Maker-Breaker games. In the process of analyzing such games, they have introduced an auxiliary simple game which they called "the Box Game". They came up with a simple necessary and sufficient condition for Maker's win in the Box Game and used it (only the "sufficient part") to study the biased connectivity game on K_n. The "necessary part" was never used. This is quite lucky since it is false. In this talk we fix this mistake (in several ways). If time permits, I will describe an application of the "necessary part" of the corrected criterion.

Based on joint works with Michael Krivelevich, Milos Stojakovic and Tibor Szabo and with Asaf Ferber and Michael Krivelevich.