On the Nature and Complexity of an Impartial Two-Player Variant of the Game Lights-Out

Abstract

In this paper we study a variant of the solitaire game Lights-Out, where the player's goal is to turn off a grid of lights. This variant is a two-player impartial game where the goal is to make the final valid move. This version is playable on any simple graph where each node is given an assignment of either a 0 (representing a light that is off) or 1 (representing a light that is on). We focus on finding the Nimbers of this game on grid graphs and generalized Petersen graphs. We utilize a recursive algorithm to compute the Nimbers for 2 x n grid graphs and for some generalized Petersen graphs.