Maker-Maker games of rank 4 are PSPACE-complete

Abstract

The Maker-Maker convention of positional games is played on a hypergraph whose edges are interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex, aiming at being first to pick all the vertices of some edge. Optimal play can only lead to a first player win or a draw, and deciding between the two is known to be PSPACE-complete even for 6-uniform hypergraphs. We establish PSPACE-completeness for hypergraphs of rank 4. As an intermediary, we use the recently introduced achievement positional games, a more general convention in which each player has their own winning sets (blue and red). We show that deciding whether the blue player has a winning strategy as the first player is PSPACE-complete even with blue edges of size 2 or 3 and pairwise disjoint red edges of size 2. The result for hypergraphs of rank 4 in the Maker-Maker convention follows as a simple corollary.