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On the Complexity of the Maker-Breaker Happy Vertex Game

Authors: Mathieu Hilaire, Perig Montfort, and Nacim Oijid

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 366, 13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026)


Abstract
Given a c-colored graph G, a vertex v of G is said to be happy if it has the same color as all its neighbors. The notion of happy vertices was introduced by Zhang and Li [Peng Zhang and Angsheng Li, 2015] to compute the homophily of a graph. Eto, Fujimoto, Kiya, Matsushita, Miyano, Murao and Saitoh [Hiroshi Eto et al., 2025] introduced the Maker-Maker version of the Happy vertex game, where two players compete to claim more happy vertices than their opponent. We introduce here the Maker-Breaker happy vertex game: two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately color the vertices of a graph with their respective colors. Maker aims to maximize the number of happy vertices at the end, while Breaker aims to prevent her. This game is also a scoring version of the Maker-Breaker domination game introduced by Duchene, Gledel, Parreau and Renault [Duchene et al., 2020], as a happy vertex corresponds exactly to a vertex that is not dominated in the domination game. Therefore, this game is a very natural game on graphs and can be studied within the scope of scoring positional games [Bagan et al., 2024]. We initiate here the complexity study of this game, by proving that computing its score is PSPACE-complete on trees, NP-hard on caterpillars, and polynomial on subdivided stars. Finally, we provide the exact value of the score on graphs of maximum degree 2, and we provide an FPT-algorithm to compute the score on graphs of bounded neighborhood diversity. An important contribution of the paper is that, to achieve our hardness results, we introduce a new type of incidence graph called the literal-clause incidence graph for 2-SAT formulas. We prove that QMAX 2-SAT remains PSPACE-complete even if this graph is acyclic, and that MAX 2-SAT remains NP-complete, even if this graph is acyclic and has maximum degree 2, i.e. is a union of paths. We demonstrate the importance of this contribution by proving that Incidence, the scoring positional game played on a graph is also PSPACE-complete when restricted to forests.

Cite as

Mathieu Hilaire, Perig Montfort, and Nacim Oijid. On the Complexity of the Maker-Breaker Happy Vertex Game. In 13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 366, pp. 24:1-24:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)


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@InProceedings{hilaire_et_al:LIPIcs.FUN.2026.24,
  author =	{Hilaire, Mathieu and Montfort, Perig and Oijid, Nacim},
  title =	{{On the Complexity of the Maker-Breaker Happy Vertex Game}},
  booktitle =	{13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026)},
  pages =	{24:1--24:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-417-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{366},
  editor =	{Iacono, John},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2026.24},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-257434},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2026.24},
  annote =	{Keywords: Maker-Breaker game, Domination game, happy vertex game, scoring game, complexity}
}
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