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Virus Versus Mankind

  • Aviezri S. Fraenkel
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 2063)

Abstract

We define a two-player virus game played on a finite cyclic digraph G=(V,E). Each vertex is either occupied by a single virus, or is unoccupied.A move consists of transplanting a virus from some u into a selected neighborhood N(u) of u, while devouring every virus in N(u), and replicating in N(u), i.e., placing a virus on all vertices of N(u) where there wasn’t any virus. The player first killing all the virus wins, and the opponent loses. If there is no last move, the outcome is a draw. Giving a minimum of the underlying theory, we exhibit the nature of the games on hand of examples. The 3-fold motivation for exploring these games stems from complexity considerations in combinatorial game theory, extending the hitherto 0-player and solitaire cellular automata games to two-player games, and the theory of linear error correcting codes.

Keywords

two-player cellular automata games generalized Sprague-Grundy function 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001

Authors and Affiliations

  • Aviezri S. Fraenkel
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Computer Science and Applied MathematicsThe Weizmann Institute of ScienceRehovotIsrael

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