Partizan Serial Nim

Abstract

A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to determine the outcome (i.e., which player has a winning strategy) of a given position in combinatorial games. Nim is a well-known and fundamental ruleset in combinatorial game theory. This paper proposes a novel partizan variant of Nim called Partizan-Serial-Nim, defined as follows: there are $n$ piles of stones indexed by $1, 2, \ldots, n$; the two players have permutations $\mathbfσ^L$ and $\mathbfσ^R$ of $(1, 2, \ldots, n)$, respectively; a move is to remove any positive number of stones from the non-empty pile with the minimum value in the player's permutation; the player who cannot make a move loses. This ruleset is a generalization of Serial-Nim and Partizan-End-Nim. We give an algorithm to compute the outcome of a given position in Partizan-Serial-Nim in $O(n^2)$ time, provided that each arithmetic and comparison operation is performed in $O(1)$ time. Also, for the case where all non-empty piles have the same number $m$ of stones, we prove that the outcome does not depend on $m$ for $m \geq 2$ and present an algorithm to compute the outcome in $O(n)$ time. Further, we prove that the atomic weight of every position in Partizan-Serial-Nim is an integer.