Bachet's game with lottery moves

Abstract

Bachet's game is a variant of the game of Nim. There are $n$ objects in one pile. Two players take turns to remove any positive number of objects not exceeding some fixed number $m$. The player who takes the last object loses. We consider a variant of Bachet's game in which each move is a lottery over set $\{1,2,\dots ,m\}$. The outcome of a lottery is the number of objects that player takes from the pile. We show that under some nondegenericity assumptions on the set of available lotteries the probability that the first player wins in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium converges to $1/2$ as $n$ tends to infinity.

12 pages. Minor revisions. To appear in "Discrete Mathematics"