On a game on graphs

Felix Günther, Irina Mustata

Published 2013-02-22Version 1

We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step, they either say nothing or tell what number they have. Both of them will eventually figure out their number after a certain amount of time. The game is rather cooperative than competitive, and employs the notions of common knowledge and mutual knowledge. We generalize this game to arbitrary (directed and non-directed) simple graphs and try to establish for which graphs one or both of them will figure out the solution, and how long they do need to find it. We give a complete answer for the case of two players, even if they are both allowed to discuss before the start of the game.