Virus Versus Mankind

Humanity is but a passing episode in the eternal life of the virus Abstract We deene a two-player virus game played on a nite cyclic digraph G = (V; E). Each vertex is either occupied by a virus, or is unoccupied. A move consists of moving a virus from some u into a selected neighborhood N (u) of u, while devouring every virus in N (u), and replicating in N (u), i.e., placing a virus on all vertices of N (u) where there wasn't any virus. The player rst killing all the virus wins, and the opponent loses. If there is no last move, the outcome is a draw. Giving a minimum of the underlying theory, we exhibit the nature of the games on hand of examples. The 3-fold motivation for exploring these games stems from complexity considerations in combinatorial game theory, extending the hitherto 0-player and solitaire cellular automata games to two-player games, and the theory of linear error correcting codes.