Algomanet - spring 2024

Basic information

The Algomanet course given by Miloš Stojaković, which is scheduled for the autumn 2025, will take place in the week September 1-5 at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. The courses will be delivered on site only, starting at 9am on Monday September 1 and concluding in late afternoon on Friday Septmeber 5. In the preceding week, i.e., the week August 25-29, EUROCOMB 2025 will take place in Budapest.

Miloš Stojaković: Introduction to Positional Games

Positional Game Theory provides a solid mathematical footing for a variety of two-player games of perfect information, usually played on discrete objects (like graphs), with a number of applications in other branches of mathematics and computer science. The field is just a few decades old, and it has experienced a considerable growth in recent years. Our goal is to introduce some basic concepts and notions, followed by recent results and numerous open problems. The prerequisites include undergraduate knowledge of discrete mathematics and probability, and the lectures could be of interest to people with a wide range of backgrounds and different levels of seniority. Topics that will be covered include: definition and types of positional game, Tic-Tac-Toe generalizations, some general criteria determining the winner, positional games on graphs, several standard games on graphs (Connectivity, Perfect Matching, Hamiltonicity, Fixed Graph), biased games and threshold biases, Avoider-Enforcer games - strict and monotone, positional games on random boards.