Problem

Source: BdMO 2024 Higher Secondary National P10

Tags: Combinatorial games, combinatorics, graph theory



Juty and Azgor plays the following game on a \((2n+1) \times (2n+1)\) board with Juty moving first. Initially all cells are colored white. On Juty's turn, she colors a white cell green and on Azgor's turn, he colors a white cell red. The game ends after they color all the cells of the board. Juty wins if all the green cells are connected, i.e. given any two green cells, there is at least one chain of neighbouring green cells connecting them (we call two cells neighboring if they share at least one corner), otherwise Azgor wins. Determine which player has a winning strategy. Proposed by Atonu Roy Chowdhury