Problem

Some friends of yours have grown tired of the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (a...

Some friends of yours have grown tired of the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (after all, they ask, isn't it just breadth-first search?) and decide to invent a game with a little more punch, algorithmically speaking. Here's how it works.

You start with a set X of n actresses and a set Y of n actors, and two players P0 and P1. Player P0 names an actress x1 ε X, player P1 names an actor y1 who has appeared in a movie with x1, player P0 names an actress x2 who has appeared in a movie with y1, and so on. Thus, P0 and P1 collectively generate a sequence x1, y1, x2, y2,... such that each actor/actress in the sequence has costarred with the actress/actor immediately preceding. A player Pi (i = 0, 1) loses when it is Pi's turn to move, and he/she cannot name a member of his/her set who hasn't been named before.

Suppose you are given a specific pair of such sets X and Y , with complete information on who has appeared in a movie with whom. A strategy for Pi, in our setting, is an algorithm that takes a current sequence x1, y1, x2, y2, … and generates a legal next move for Pt (assuming it's Pi's turn to move). Give a polynomial-time algorithm that decides which of the two players can force a win, in a particular instance of this game.

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