Talk: Open problems in misere game theory
May 1st, 2017
Talk: Open problems in misere game theory
Thursday, May 4th, 2017
HH 3017, 1:00pm
Dr. Rebecca Milley
Combinatorial games are pure strategy games of perfect information and no luck. Under normal play, a player wins by making the last legal move. Under misere play, a player wins by "losing" on purpose: forcing the opponent to take the last move. Normal-play games form a partially-ordered abelian group with a natural addition operation and nontrivial relations of equality and inequality; but under misere play, most of this structure falls apart. This talk will give a general introduction to combinatorial game theory and discuss recent breakthroughs and current open problems in misere games.