Combinatorial game theory

• I'm beginning to write some gameboard LaTeX macros, but they are in a state of flux. In particular, I hope to design less angular drawings of some of the games and to include more general ways of marking stones and squares. Feel free to download them, and let me know what suggestions you have. In particular, what input format would you want for adding markings? The sty file, gameboard.sty requires pstricks.sty, and gastex. The file gameboard.tex has examples.

• I'm happy to report that Aaron Siegel at Berkeley has written a new Combinatorial Game Suite which is a dramatic improvement over my toolkit. In particular,
  1. The Suite is designed to be more flexible and extensible. For instance, you can implement the rules to a new game by writing a plug-in without making any changes to source code.
  2. The Suite is written in Java making it portable. (It's been tested on Windows 2000/XP, Linux and Solaris.)
  3. Aaron has provided additional functionality that were not part of my toolkit distribution, such as support for loopy games and thermographs.
  4. The Suite's has an easy to use graphical user interface.
  If you are still interested in doing investigations in combinatorial games, I highly recommend using his software. It's available at

    http://cgsuite.sourceforge.net/
  

• My old toolkit is still available, though I'm fazing it out in favor of Aaron Siegel's software. You can download games.tar.gz. In Linux, type

    tar xfz games.tar.gz

  This should create a directory games. From there, start by reading the README file.

• ``Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Combinatorial Games,'' Joint Mathematics Meetings, January, 1995. Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics and its Applications, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1995. Handout in postscript. Talk slides in postscript .

• Jeff Erickson's web page on combinatorial games

• Unsolved Problems in Combinatorial Games, by Richard Guy and Richard Nowakowski from More Games of No Chance. The article is available as a pdf file or as a postscript file compressed with gzip. (The first page of the article is blank, and the article starts on the 4th page, page 457.)

• Aviezri Fraenkel's combinatorial games bibliography

• Formerly active ongoing discussion concerning the game clobber.

• Formerly active ongoing discussion concerning the games born on day n.