On graph automorphisms related to Snort

TL;DR

This paper characterizes a class of graphs called opposable graphs related to Snort game outcomes, providing conditions for their existence, their behavior under graph products, and analyzing game outcomes on specific graph classes.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of opposable graphs, establishes their properties and preservation under graph products, and applies these results to determine Snort outcomes on chess graphs.

Findings

Opposable graphs guarantee a second-player win in Snort.

Being opposable is preserved under certain graph products.

The paper disproves Kakihara's conjecture with counterexamples.

Abstract

We study the outcomes of various positions of the game Snort. When played on graphs admitting an automorphism of order two that maps vertices outside of their closed neighbourhoods (called opposable graphs), the second player has a winning strategy. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a graph to be opposable, and prove that the property of being opposable is preserved by several graph products. We show examples that a graph being second-player win does not imply that the graph is opposable, which answers Kakihara's conjecture. We give an analogous definition to opposability, which gives a first-player winning strategy; we prove a necessary condition for this property to be preserved by the Cartesian and strong products. As an application of our results, we determine the outcome of Snort when played on various $n\times m$ chess graphs.