Parent Summer Graduate Workshop:
Combinatorial Game Theory (Summer Graduate Workshop II)

This workshop will cover all aspects of the theory of combinatorial games, including algorithms for such games, complexity of those algorithms, connections with artificial intelligence and economics, cellular automata, and aspects of specific games, including Go, Amazons, Domineering, Dots and Boxes, etc.

In many ways, this workshop is a sequel to a conference held at MSRI in July, 1994, whose proceedings ``Games of No Chance'' were published by Cambridge University Press, MSRI vol. 29. The workshop immediately follows a 2-week summer graduate program at MSRI on this topic, and it is expected that many of the graduate students will stay for the workshop.


Schedule: Combinatorial Game Theory Workshop

(subject to change)
Monday, July 24 morning: GO
8:15 am Check-in begins
8:45 am David Eisenbud Welcome from MSRI's Director
9:00 am Elwyn Berlekamp Environmental Go
10:00 am Morning Tea
10:30 am Bill Spight Analysis of the 4/21/98 Jiang-Rui endgame
11:00 am Bill Fraser Analysis Tools: "Brute-Force" and "Winsolve"
11:30 am Matthew Cook Still Life
12:00 noon Lunch
Monday, July 24, afternoon: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
1:30 pm Jurg Nievergelt Half-a-century of computer chess: The longest running experiment in knowledge engineering
2:30 pm Michael Lachmann, Cris Moore, Ivan Rapaport Who wins Domineering on rectangular boards?
3:00 pm Afternoon Tea
3:30 pm Fabian Maeser Global threats in combinatorial games: A computation model with applications to chess endgames
4:00 pm Vadim Anshelevich The game of Hex: The hierarchical approach
Tuesday, July 25, morning: PARTIZAN GAMES
9:00 am Tom Ferguson Another form of Matrix Nim
10:00 am Morning Tea
10:30 am Frank Harary, Wolfgang Slany, Oleg Verbitsky A symmetric strategy in graph avoidance games
11:00 am Len Haff A natural map of numbers and combinatorial games
12:00 am Georg Snatzke Amazons
12:30 noon Lunch
Tuesday, July 25, afternoon: CHARACTERISTIC TWO
1:30 pm Richard Nowakowski The game of End-Nim
2:30 pm Katherine Scott Loony dots and boxes endgame
3:00 pm Afternoon Tea
3:30 pm Howard Landman Alternate proof of the periodicity of the Sprague Grundy Function of Wythoff's Game
4:00 pm Dong Geon Kim A decoding scheme for 4-ary lexicodes with minimum distance 4
5:00 pm Reception
Wednesday, July 26, morning: PUZZLES
9:00 am Demo Session, north end of second floor
10:30 am Morning Tea
11:00 am Eric Demaine, Martin Demaine, Helena Verrill Coin-moving puzzles
11:30 am Jeremiah Farrell Games on word configurations
12:00 am Cris Moore One-dimensional Peg Solitaire
12:15 noon Lunch
Wed., July 26, afternoon: PROBABILITISTIC, MULTI-PLAYER
1:30 pm Matthew Ginsberg Games of some chance: Extending computational techniques to games of imperfect information
2:30 pm Arthur Benjamin Le Her
3:00 pm Afternoon Tea
3:30 pm Hiroyuki Iida An approach to three-person game programming: A case study using Mediocrity
4:00 pm Open Problem Session
Thursday, July 27: INFINITE GAMES AND CELLULAR AUTOMATA
9:30 am John Conway TBA
10:30 am Morning Tea
11:00 am Scott Huddleston,Jerry Shurman Transfinite Chomp
11:30 am Jacob Lurie Vines
12:00 noon Lunch
1:30 pm David Wolfe Go endgames are hard
2:00 pm David Eppstein Searching for spaceships
2:30 pm Afternoon Tea
3:00 pm Aviezri Fraenkel Two-player games on cellular automata
Friday, July 28 (also Berlekamp Conference)
9:00 am Martin Mueller Arrows: A Program that Plays Amazons
9:30 am Takenobu Takizawa An Application of Mathematical Game Theory to Go Endgames: Some Width-Two-Entrance Rooms with/without Kos
10:00 am Morning Tea
10:30 am Sol Golomb Hypercube Tic-Tac-Toe
11:30 am Lunch
1:15 pm David Moews The abstract structure of the group of games
1:30 pm Jonathan Schaeffer The Games Computers (and People) Play
2:30 pm Afternoon Tea
3:00 pm Bob Li A game of switching network and a game of triangles

Funding

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