Atomic weights and the combinatorial game of Bipass

Urban Larsson, Richard J. Nowakowski

Published 2020-07-08Version 1

We define an all-small ruleset, Bipass, within the normal-play theory of combinatorial games. A game is played on finite strips of black and white stones. Stones of different colors are swapped provided they do not bypass one of their own kind. We find a surjective function from the strips to integer atomic weights (Berlekamp, Conway and Guy 1982) that measures the number of 'units' in all-small games. This result provides explicit winning strategies for many games, and in cases where it does not, it gives narrow bounds for the canonical form game values. We prove that the game value *2 does not appear as a disjunctive sum of Bipass. Moreover, we find game values for some parametrized families of games, including an infinite number of strips of value *.