Mathematics Colloquium: Parity Games
Nov 2, 2009, 4:45 PMPrice 203
Professor Hans Nordstrom of the University of Portland will give a talk entitled Parity Games: Odd-wins and its generalizations. Join us at 4:30 in Price 201 for refreshments.
There are many derivations of the well known pile game, Nim; one such is called Odd-Wins. Players alternate taking objects from a pile with an odd number of objects at the start of the game. The winner is the player who has removed an odd number when the pile is left empty. We’ll discuss the general solution to this game, as well as how to play the game on tapes, tableau, and graphs, and analyze partial solutions which my students, Erica Shannon (Reed College) and Jason Xu (University of Arizona) developed over an 8 week WiVaM REU-RET program last summer. Much of the talk will be accessible to undergraduate students with childhood experience playing board games. Elementary notions related to combinatorial games, graphs, and number theory will be presented.
Posted by Michael Boardman (boardman@pacificu.edu) on Oct 29, 2009 at 11:00 AM
