Adding Resources and Misereness

I mentioned early on that I wanted this to list lots of good resources for CGT material. I have gotten to say a lot of other things, but today I will repeat a lot of what I've been emailed, and use that to update the surroundings of this blog.

Richard Nowakowski (one of the three authors of Lessons in Play) provides a link to articles from the Games of No Chance series, which he edited. Aside from this, his game page provides good links for "Budding Combinatorial Game Theorists", including Aaron Siegel's Combinatorial Game Suite.

Martin Mueller mentions that his team's Fuego Go-playing program beat a 9 Dan professional last month. He provides some games on the Fuego page. (I'll quickly admit to not knowing (yet) the rules to Go.) I am not familiar with the program, and thus do not know if it uses any randomization, as mentioned in the complexity blog.

Aviezri Fraenkel's selected CGT bibliography certainly deserves a link. It's been a long time since I saw this and said "Woah!"

I added a link to Thane Plambeck's misere games blog. Unlike the basic definition of a combinatorial game, a misere game is one in which the last play is the losing play. When I was first taught Nim (called "Sticks" by my 8th grade teacher) I learned it as a misere game; the player who took the last "stick" loses.

Although I learned the 3-5-7 version of Nim thoroughly, I was ignorant of the evaluation trick until midway through college. In my freshman year, I challenged my linear algebra professor to a game and he proceeded to mentally process the trick and make all the right moves---until the end of the game. He was playing the standard, non-misere version, and at the end asked "Wait... which one of us wins?"

I learned that version of Nim, Krypto and Equations all at the same time; which games did you learn early on that helped spark your interest in CGT?