Impartial avoidance and achievement games for generating symmetric and alternating groups

Int. Electron. J. Algebra 20, 70-85, 2016 We study two impartial games introduced by Anderson and Harary. Both games are played by two players who alternately select previously-unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a generating set from the jointly-selected elements wins the first game. The first player who cannot select an element without building a generating set loses the second game. We determine the nim-numbers, and therefore the outcomes, of these games for symmetric and alternating groups.