4-uniform Maker-Breaker and Maker-Maker games are PSPACE-complete

Abstract

We study two positional games played on hypergraphs, whose edges may be interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex of the hypergraph. We say a player fills an edge if that player has picked all the vertices of that edge. In the Maker-Maker convention, whoever first fills an edge wins, or we get a draw if no edge is filled. In the Maker-Breaker convention, the first player aims at filling an edge while the second player aims at preventing the first player from filling an edge. Our main result is that, for both games, deciding whether the first player has a winning strategy is a PSPACE-complete problem even when restricted to 4-uniform hypergraphs (of bounded maximum degree). For the Maker-Maker convention, this improves on the known PSPACE-completeness result for hypergraphs of rank 4. For the Maker-Breaker convention, this improves on the known PSPACE-completeness result for 5-uniform hypergraphs, and closes the complexity gap since the problem for hypergraphs of rank 3 is known to be solvable in polynomial time. As a corollary of our construction, we actually get a stronger result: deciding whether the first player has a winning strategy for the vertex-$C_4$-game played on arbitrary graphs, where the winning sets are the vertex sets of 4-cycles, is a PSPACE-complete problem for both conventions.