combinatorial-game-theory

The talks on the final day of Games At Mumbai continued the excellence of the week!  Here are my summaries: Dhruv Basin, "On ergodicity of a 1-dimensional PCA with parity dependent updation rules" Dhruv talked about the site percolation problem--whether there are open clusters on randomly-generated graphs.  In a game version of this, vertices (integer coordinates of the Cartesian plane, so the bo…

Today we kicked off a big day of talks at the first "official" day of Games at Mumbai .  Urban taught a CGT course (for grad students) last semester, and I believe that many of the presenters created new combinatorial games in his course, which they spoke about.  There were many very creative games! Carlos Pereira dos Santos, "A quick journey into Combinatorial Game Theory" Carlos gave us an intr…

The last round of talks just happened!  They were great again!  Here are my summaries. Dana Ernst: "Impartial Geodetic Convexity Achievement and Avoidance Games on Graphs" Joint work with: B. Benesh, M. Meyer, S. Salmon, and N. Sieben.  Dana, who also spent time teaching at Plymouth State University, talked about impartial games on graph subsets that contain all shortest paths between vertices in…

Aaron Siegel: "Elwyn Berlekamp and Combinatorial Game Theory" Aaron gave an amazing history of Elwyn's 56 years of publishing about games.  As he later mentioned, probably none of us at the workshop would have been in the field if it weren't for him.  This was such a great talk.  Here are some of the things I learned: At 10 years old, Elwyn was allowed to play Dots-and-Boxes with his friends in t…

For the tournament game at Fundy and Games, we played a variant of Domineering known as NoCanDo.  (We spent the first day deciding on the name.)  This is a very nice mix of Domineering with a little splash of NoGo: each domino on the board must be adjacent to at least one uncovered square.  That's it.  You're not allowed to play a domino if it would be completely surrounded or if would cause anot…

As a sophomore at Georgia Tech, I took a class on Combinatorial Game Theory with two good friends, David Hollis (now at Reckless Abandon Labs, which he founded) and Michelle Delcourt (now working towards her PhD at UIUC). As a final project, we were supposed to analyze a game combinatorially. The three of us ended […]

Last week I was at the Banff International Research Station for a workshop on Combinatorial Game Theory. It was excellent! I got to meet many CGT bigwigs, play a lot of great games, present some things and even prove a few things. Here were some highlights: Presenting Atropos Meeting 35 new friends Playing Cookie Cutter with creator Paul Ottaway Listening to current NoGo World Champion, Fan Xie…

As someone mentioned on the computational complexity blog yesterday , the Voronoi Game is a game of perfect information without randomness. The two-player version is a good partisan combinatorial game. The game is based on Voronoi diagrams, which describes which areas of a plane are closest to each of a collection of points. Given a set of points, S, in a space, a Voronoi diagram is a partition…