Virus Versus Mankind

• Authors: Aviezri S. Fraenkel
• Venue: CG '00 Revised Papers from the Second International Conference on Computers and Games
• Year: 2000

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.