combinatorial-games

Games@Dal 2016 talks: "Hopeful Windows in Cellular Automata and Combinatorial Games" - Urban Larsson Urban talked about the Hopeful Window Triangle-Placing Game, a very interesting game based on his work with cellular automata games.  In this game, there are multiple steps per turn revolving around drawing a digital 45-45-90 triangle on a grid.  The triangle always has one box at the top, and the…

Urban Larsson gave a cool talk at Integers 2011 about combinatorial games based on cellular automata . Unlike the Game of Life (which is an automata, but not a game in the "combinatorial" sense), Urban concocted actual two-player impartial rulesets based on Wolfram's rules 60 and 110. I'm not familiar with these, but I do think the two games are very interesting! The Rule 60 Game is a ruleset…

The past few months I have been working on some basic planning for teaching combinatorial games as a first-year college class. At Wittenberg, we have "WittSem" courses; each incoming freshman must take one. This is finally really coming together, so I will likely teach this course in the fall. Woohoo! This is a bit of a tricky task. Last semester my course started off as too difficult because…

At BIRS this year, the game everyone was interested in was Go . I guess it's hard to compete with that! Aside from Go, one of the big features was NoGo . We had the first ever NoGo world tournament, both for humans and computers. After those tournaments were over, Fan Xie, the reigning human champion, battled Bob Hearn's champion NoGo-playing program. When presented with a new game like NoG…

There were some issues and comments from Monday's post that I still have to look into. I will! Fear not! I wanted to run the latest iteration of a game class description here: Combinatorial Games are an avenue to model basic decision-making and computation. In this course, we will look at computational and mathematical basics of combinatorial game theory, analyzing such games as Chess, Go, Che…

One thing I remembered I hoped to do with this blog was describe different combinatorial games. In honor of Paul Ottaway who made many comments the other week concerning adding misere games, I would like to talk about a game presented by him, Cookie Cutter. If there are other games you would like me to talk about, I would be glad to do so. Just let me know! Cookie cutter is an impartial game t…

I realized I was using the same word to mean two different things, recently. That word was 'suboptimal' and I was describing move options in a game. On one hand, I said that a move was suboptimal if there was another move that definitely was a winning move. On the other hand, I said that a move was suboptimal if it was definitely a losing move. These both sort of make sense, and I think this is …