Technorati is working less and less well these days– it doesn’t update as often as it should, and misses links that I know are there– but it’s still good for the occasional new find. Such as Susan Beckhardt’s Intrinsically Knotted, which features among other things a really nice post about mathematical games:
We’re going to play a game called G(6, 3). It’s a two person game, and you can go first. The rules are as follows: We start with a total of six counters, and we’ll each take turns removing some of the counters-exactly one or two counters each turn. The winner is the one who takes the last counter.
It turns out there’s a foolproof winning strategy for the person going second in this game, and, indeed for all games of this type. That fact leads toward some interesting math, which she promises to discuss in future posts.
The really amusing thing here, for me, is that Susan is a student at Union– her next post features a couple of pictures of snow falling on campus. And the games she’s talking about were invented by the math professor who lives next door to me.
Small world.
Gah! Now I have to finish the second half of that discussion!
Wait, Bill invented Nim??? How did I not know that? We used nim in our discrete math class back at UMD.
No, Nim’s been around for way longer than that. The game/paradox Bill Zwicker invented is Hypergame.