Peg solitaire and Conway's soldiers on infinite graphs

09/23/2021

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by   , et al.

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Peg solitaire is classically a one-player game played on a square grid board containing pegs. The goal of the game is to have a single peg remaining on the board by sequentially jumping a peg over an adjacent peg onto an empty square while eliminating the jumped peg. Conway's soldiers is a related game played on ℤ^2 with pegs initially located on the half-space y ≤ 0. The goal is to bring a peg as far as possible on the board using peg solitaire jumps. Conway showed that bringing a peg to the line y = 5 is impossible with finitely many jumps. Applying Conway's approach, we prove an analogous impossibility property on graphs. In addition, we generalize peg solitaire on finite graphs as introduced by Beeler and Hoilman (2011) to an infinite game played on countable graphs.