Chomp on numerical semigroups

Abstract

We consider the two-player game chomp on posets associated to numerical semigroups and show that the analysis of strategies for chomp is strongly related to classical properties of semigroups. We characterize, which player has a winning-strategy for symmetric semigroups, semigroups of maximal embedding dimension and several families of numerical semigroups generated by arithmetic sequences. Furthermore, we show that which player wins on a given numerical semigroup is a decidable question. Finally, we extend several of our results to the more general setting of subsemigroups of $\mathbb{N} \times T$, where $T$ is a finite abelian group.