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
Problem
Source: BdMO 2024 Higher Secondary National P10
Tags: Combinatorial games, combinatorics, graph theory
Kala_Para_Na
22.05.2024 18:47
Problem proposer here!
We call the first player A, and the second player B. It's easy to see that for \(n=1\), A wins by coloring the middle cell green. So let us now assume that \(n>1\). We claim that B wins always.
Suppose the first move of A is the cell \((i,j)\). Then B locates the furthest corner cell from \((i,j)\) (we can assume WLOG that this furthest corner cell is \((1,1)\)), and colors its diagonally adjacent cell.
Next B pairs the cells like this:
If A colors one of these cells Green, B colors the corresponding paired cell red. If A colors any other cell, B colors any arbitrary cell except \((1,1)\). Since A has the last move, B can force A to color the cell \((1,1)\). This way, B wins, because there is no connection between the cell \((1,1)\) and A's first move \((i,j)\).
In fact, no chain of Green cells starting from \((1,1)\) can get out of the first row or first column. Suppose such a chain lands on the second row (WLOG, the case for column is the same), and the first cell on second row it comes to is \((2,k)\) for \(k> 2\). So all the cells from \((2,3)\) to \((2,k-1)\) are red. As a result, all the cells from \((1,2)\) to \((1,k-2)\) are Green. But since \((2,k)\) is Green, \((1,k-1)\) is red.
So we have \((1,k-2)\) is Green; both \((1,k-1)\) and \((2,k-1)\) are red; and \((2,k)\) is Green. So the green cells are not connected, contradiction!