Maker-Breaker is solved in polynomial time on hypergraphs of rank 3

Abstract

In the Maker-Breaker positional game, Maker and Breaker take turns picking vertices of a hypergraph $H$, and Maker wins if and only if she possesses all the vertices of some edge of $H$. Deciding the outcome (i.e. which player has a winning strategy) is PSPACE-complete even when restricted to 5-uniform hypergraphs (Koepke, 2025). On hypergraphs of rank 3, a structural characterization of the outcome and a polynomial-time algorithm have been obtained for two subcases: one by Kutz (2005), the other by Rahman and Watson (2020) who conjectured that their result should generalize to all hypergraphs of rank 3. We prove this conjecture through a structural characterization of the outcome and a description of both players' optimal strategies, all based on intersections of some key subhypergraph collections, from which we derive a polynomial-time algorithm. Another corollary of our structural result is that, if Maker has a winning strategy on a hypergraph of rank 3, then she can ensure to win the game in a number of rounds that is logarithmic in the number of vertices. Note: This paper provides a counterexample to a similar result which was incorrectly claimed (arXiv:2209.11202, Theorem 22).