Topic: Recent Advances in Losing
Speaker: Prof. David Kinny
(Kyoto University)
Date: 13:30 to 15:00. Wednesday, 30-Oct-2012
Place: 103 Delta Building (台達館)
Abstract:
Combinatorial Game Theory (CGT) deals with finite turn-taking games of perfect information, such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Nim, Chess, and Go. Impartial games are those, such as Nim, where the legal moves do not depend on whose turn it is to move. Those impartial games where the last player to move wins are easily solved by the Sprague-Grundy Theorem, discovered more than 75 years ago. Misere games, where by contrast the last player to move loses, can be very much harder to analyse, and some apparently simple ones still remain unsolved. In effect, the winner of a misere game is the the player with an effective losing strategy for the normal game. In this talk I will review some basic elements of CGT, present some interesting old and new variants of Nim that illustrate these issues, and describe significant recent progress in analyzing and solving misere impartial games
All faculty and students are welcome to attend.
