Heidi Gebauer

In the tournament game two players, called Maker and Breaker, alternately take turns in claiming an unclaimed edge of the complete graph on n vertices and selecting one of the two possible orientations. Before the game starts, Breaker fixes an arbitrary tournament T_k on k vertices. Maker wins if, at the end of the game, her digraph contains a copy of T_k; otherwise Breaker wins. In our main result, we show that Maker has a winning strategy for k = (2-o(1))log_2 n, improving the constant factor in previous results of Beck and the second author. This is asymptotically tight since it is known that for k = (2-o(1))log_2 n Breaker can prevent that the underlying graph of Maker's graph contains a k-clique. Moreover the precise value of our lower bound differs from the upper bound only by an additive constant of 12. We also discuss the question whether the random graph intuition, which suggests that the threshold for k is asymptotically the same for the game played by two "clever" players and the game played by two "random" players, is supported by the tournament game: It will turn out that, while a straightforward application of this intuition fails, a more subtle version of it is still valid. Finally, we consider the orientation-game version of the tournament game, where Maker wins the game if the final digraph -- containing also the edges directed by Breaker -- possesses a copy of T_k. We prove that in that game Breaker has a winning strategy for k = (4+o(1))log_2 n.

A basic statement in graph theory is that every inclusion-maximal forest is connected, i.e. a tree. Using a definiton for higher dimensional forests by Graham and Lovasz and the connectivity-related notion of tightness for hypergraphs introduced by Arocha, Bracho and Neumann-Lara in, we provide an example of a saturated, i.e. inclusion-maximal 3-forest that is not tight. This resolves an open problem posed by Strausz.

We study Maker/Breaker games on the edges of sparse graphs. Maker and Breaker take turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of a given graph H. Maker aims to occupy a given target graph G and Breaker tries to prevent Maker from achieving his goal. We define a function f and show that for every d-regular graph G on n vertices there is a graph H with at most f(d)n edges such that Maker can occupy a copy of G in the game on H.

We consider the following cake cutting game: Alice chooses a set P of n points in the square (cake) [0,1]^2, where (0,0) is in P; Bob cuts out n axis-parallel rectangles with disjoint interiors, each of them having a point of P as the lower left corner; Alice keeps the rest. It has been conjectured that Bob can always secure at least half of the cake. This remains unsettled, and it is not even known whether Bob can get any positive fraction independent of n. We prove that if Alice can force Bob's share to tend to zero, then she must use very many points; namely, to prevent Bob from gaining more than 1/r of the cake, she needs at least 2^{2^{\Omega(r)}} points.

We show how to construct a non-2-colorable k-uniform hypergraph with (2^(1 + o(1)))^k edges. By the duality of hypergraphs and monotone k-CNF-formulas this gives an unsatisfiable monotone k-CNF with (2^(1 + o(1)))^k clauses