Impartial Games with Activeness

Abstract

A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of many well-known combinatorial games are naturally decomposed into a disjunctive sum of multiple components and can be analyzed independently for each component. Therefore, the study of disjunctive sums is a major topic in combinatorial game theory. Combinatorial games in which both players have the same set of possible moves for every position are called impartial games. In the normal-play convention, it is known that the outcome of a disjunctive sum of impartial games can be obtained by computing the Grundy number of each term. The theory of impartial games is generalized in various forms. This paper proposes another generalization of impartial games to a new framework, impartial games with activeness: each game is assigned a status of either ``active'' or ``inactive''; the status may change by moves; a disjunctive sum of games ends immediately, not only when no further moves can be made, but also when all terms become inactive. We formally introduce impartial games with activeness and investigate their fundamental properties.