BIRS Workshop, 2011

Last week I was at the Banff International Research Station for a workshop on Combinatorial Game Theory. It was excellent! I got to meet many CGT bigwigs, play a lot of great games, present some things and even prove a few things.

Here were some highlights:

• Presenting Atropos
• Meeting 35 new friends
• Playing Cookie Cutter with creator Paul Ottaway
• Listening to current NoGo World Champion, Fan Xie, explain why he was losing to Bob Hearn's NoGo program while playing it.
• Proving something on Tuesday and seeing the result mentioned in a talk on Wednesday morning!
• Learning to Curl
• Witnessing Zhujiu Jiang take on eight mathematicians at once in Go. (He only lost one of the matches.)
• Playing Games... and losing most of them.
  

I learned a lot, and once I sort out all my notes I'll have a number of good blog topics from the meeting.

In other news, welcome to the Spring semester! I will return to the schedule of posting Tuesdays and Fridays. As normal, let me know if there's anything interesting you'd like me to cover! :)