CGTC1, Day 3

The third and final day, and the talks were again excellent!  Catia Dias started off by showing off the results of her very thorough Ph.D. thesis.  She discovered and proved many properties of game values and the lattices of their followers, which I think she generated using the generalized Conway construction.  Her talk was extremely thorough as she took on and solved many conjectures.  (I later learned that Richard Nowakowski had proposed three of these conjectures.)  The first conjecture postulated that the lattice of a game is modular exactly when it is distributive, which she showed to be false.  She also proved the Representation Theorem for Games: for every lattice, there is a set of games that generates an isomorphic lattice.  This result holds for both finite and infinite lattices!

She was so complete answering these lattice questions that the biggest open problem (at least, for Thane) is that it's open whether the representation theorem also works for misere play.

Lisa Rougetet spoke next, after having delved into the history of combinatorial games in France.  Her goal was to determine the origins of the French term "Jeux de Combinaisons" (Games of Combinations) and see how it evolved during the 19th and 20th century towards the current CG definition.  At the end of the 18th century, the term "pures combinasons" was used to describe some appropriate games such as draughts and chess.  Then, in the mid 19th century, "Jeux de Combinaisons" shows up, but it is used for games with hidden information.  Later on, it appears again, and is differentiated from games of chance as we would expect, but then goes on to include billiards.  (Perhaps this is as relevant as the bowling version of Kayles.)  Combinatorial games show up in a later text by Edouard Lucas about recreational math, but he uses the term "recreational games".

In the 1900s, William Rivier, a Swiss chess player, divides games into three parts: chance, skill, and Jeux de Combinaisons.  This section includes games with two players and no randomness, but they didn't always have perfect information.  Still, this work is extremely cool because a generalized diagram of a game is included: perhaps the first game tree to make print.

Finally, in 1936, Rene de Passel refers to two alternating player games with perfect information and no randomness as "Jeux de Pure Reflexion".  Hooray, Combinatorial Games!  Lisa's investigation is ongoing, but she notes that the names may have diverged at this point, as Jeux de Combination now refers only to single-player puzzles.

Andre Fabbri spoke next on applying monte carlo evaluation strategies to solitaire versions of games.  He looked specifically at impartial Clobber, but perhaps more interestingly used an additional tactic along with the monte carlo methods: instead of just evaluating game paths to their completion, he included additional heuristic subgoals to help focus the search.  Paths that showed promise with these heuristics were weighted more heavily when being chosen for further exploitation.  In impartial clobber, one of his heuristics involved minimizing the number of remaining pieces in each quadrant of the board.  (For example, the four 4x4 subgrids of an 8x8 board.)

His work did not reveal new results for solitaire clobber; the cases he looked at are all already known.  Instead, he was checking to see whether his player came close to the actual answers.  In the future, Andre is considering using more varied subgoals and using parameterized weights to help determine how much to consider the subgoals during evaluation.  One of the exciting things about this talk was how many suggestions people had for Andre to continue his work.  It was obvious that there is lots more he can do with this nice heuristiced Monte Carlo approach!

Ilan Adler delivered an enlightening approach to finding overlap between the CGT and Classical Game Theory communities.  He attended a conference in the summer of 2013 at Stony Brook, a workshop on computational game theory.  Along with Aviezri and Sam Payne, he defined Economic-Combinatorial (EC) games.  In these games, there is a master combinatorial game, but before each turn the players play an economic game, the decider game, to determine who will make the next move.

The winner of the decider game (the decider) chooses who goes next on the master game.  For example, the two players could be competing in a game of Domineering, with the decider game as a chip-bidding game.  More generally, the decider game can be given as a payoff matrix and can include mixed strategies.  Then the overall game, the Strategic Game, can also be written as a bimatrix one-sum game, which can be solved using linear programming.

One pretty cool result of this analysis is that if there is a bidding game where only the winner spends their bid, then Red and Blue will have pure perfect strategies for the game!

Elan made some great comments about the work done in classical GT in computer science, especially interesting for me since I first presented Atropos at the Workshop on Internet Networks and Economics in 2007.  I got to see first-hand a lot of the really cool results in this field, and got a really good response after playing Atropos with that group!  (This reminds me that I need to get a JavaScript version up and running!)  Thane again had excellent words of wisdom for us, explaining that if we ever talk to someone new who says they work in game theory, the "probability they're part of our community is vanishingly small."

Svenja Huntemann wrapped up the talks with her investigation of game complexes and classification of games using their complexes.  She starts off by talking about (strong) placement games: games where a turn consists of placing a piece which will never be removed or moved, and where the order of moves doesn't matter.  This last point means that games such as Hex and Tic-Tac-Toe are not placement games.  (They can be catagorized as weak placement instead.)  This interchangeability of order allows the use of commutative algebra to analyze further!

The complexes use square-free monomials for each position, and then the edges and faces of these can be seen as either legal or illegal complexes on the graph with vertices as the variables.  Interestingly, for every simplical complex, there exists a ruleset and initial (empty) game board so that the complex is legal for that game.  Surprisingly (at least to me) the same is true of illegal complexes!  Svenja proposes investigating the same question for rulesets with more even more stringent properties. 

There is definitely lots of new exciting avenues for work, and that's true for lots of the talks I saw!  I'm really excited about how these different research directions will be tackled!

Afterwards, we again headed off to take part in some open working sessions.  Unlike Thursday, my group was able to get some new results!  Hooray!  I really liked working with people and I think a lot of new research connections were made between people that had maybe never met before.  This was a great event and I hope to attend CGTC2!

CGTC1 Day 2

First on today's program was Aline Parreau speaking about solving Ricochet Robots puzzles.  Although I've never played this game, I just recently learned of this game from two of my math colleagues at Plymouth State.  I will definitely be requesting them to bring that to game lunch this semester!  Aline and her team found bounds on the number of obstacles that needed to be placed into a grid for robots to visit each square, in both cases of passing through and actually being able to stop in the square.  She took the abstraction a bit further and introduced some bounds for tori (toruses?).

Mike Fisher described a game known as Stirling Shave.  In this game, imagine you have coins in a row.  On your turn, you choose one coin with value lower than all the coins to its right.  Then, you remove the coin and all coins on the right-hand side.  When playing this on a permutation list (instead of coins), he was able to evaluate normal and misere states by doing an interesting ordinal sum evaluation from right-to-left.

Mike's talk is the first time I've heard of tame misere rulesets.  Stirling Shave is tame because each position has either an option to 0 or to 1.  (Unless it has no options, I assume.)  Thane piped up, saying Mike's talk "gets the good housekeeping seal of approval," because Mike had taken the initiative to find the misere quotient monoid.  (I really don't know if I'm using all those terms correctly.)

Tristan Casenave gave a very interesting talk about improving Monte Carlo searches by employing an alpha-beta search to help choose the ordering of moves during evaluation.  When compared to iterative deepening with alpha-beta, this new tactic seems to work quite well!  Basically, the Monte Carlo tree search generates some results, then those numbers are used to order the moves to investigate with alpha-beta.  Indeed, this works for games other than Go, including Hex and NoGo.  I've been a bit curious, however, just how bad these algorithms are at impartial games, so I asked.  Tristan answered that he has a Nim MCTS player, and although he wasn't certain of his recollection of the results, he didn't remember being impressed.  I followed this up by asking about Arimaa, but the MCTS players are apparently not at a very good level there yet.

One interesting approximate stat that Tristan mentioned in response to a question is that Go programs seem to be improving at about the rate of 1 dan each year.  Pretty cool!

I spoke next about boolean formula games, which I also spoke about at Integers just over a year ago.  I don't think I've talked about that here yet; I should probably do that.

Paul Dorbec got up next and spoke about a graph domination game (called DOM-GAME).  This PSPACE complete game is a placement game where each player must choose a vertex that dominates a previously un-dominated vertex.  A collection of vertices dominates all the vertices in it as well as those adjacent to at least one of the collection.  This game is not impartial, however: one player is the dominator, the other the staller.  The dominator is trying to end the game quickly by dominating all the vertices.  The staller is trying to get the game to last as many moves as possible.  The "score" of the game is the total number of moves, so the dominator does better when they force a lower score.

Paul showed that the difference in scores based on which player goes first (and using best strategies, naturally) only differs by at most 1.  He defined a great term: a bluff.  A graph is a bluff for this game if all of your moves are equally good.  Thus you can "bluff" by pretending to handicap yourself and lett your opponent choose the first move.  Double bluffs, then, are graphs where the first two moves are both optimal, no matter where they are made.  In a general bluff game, it doesn't matter at all which move a player chooses at any point; all moves are always equivalent.  For example, that is the case if you play this on a graph with only singleton nodes (and no connections) or only pairs (each node is connected to exactly one other node).

Some open questions he left us with are:  Is this game PSPACE hard on trees?  Are there interesting graphs (probably meaning connected) that have a triple bluff?

Thane Plambeck rounded out the day by talking about some cool geometric Nim variants.  (Who doesn't want more variants of Nim?)  TacTix, invented by Piet Hein, is a misere-played game where there are tokens arranged in a grid.  Each turn the current player chooses a connected orthogonal line (segment) of tokens and removes them all.  Then, even further, in Nim-X you can include diagonal lines as well!  Thane showed the normal play and misere quotients to evaluate Nim-X endgames.  This was actually very helpful for me just as a review of how these quotients work to solve misere sums.  I still need more time to look at it.

In the afternoon we had some pretty deep working groups.  I joined a team interested in the (unknown?) computational complexity of Arc Kayles.  It seemed like something we could resolve, but so far we haven't figured it out.  I went back and forth on this, sometimes trying to show PSPACE hardness and other times trying to find a poly-time algorithm.  It continued to be unsolved on the trip to the dinner as well as our excellent walk back across Lisbon.  It is a really beautiful city to walk around!

That's all for today.  Tomorrow is the last full day; if I don't get a post up tomorrow night, it might not be getting posted until next week.

Happy Gaming!

CGTC1 Day 1

Today was a great day at the conference!  Bonus info: this is the first pure math workshop organized by Ludus, a Portugese organization that promotes math and holds outreach events for kids.  They're well-known for holding an annual game competition for middle schoolers that has regional and final-level parts.

A quick summary of today's talks:

Aviezri Fraenkel spoke about using alternative numeration systems to determine the complexities of games.  He noticed that he could express rulesets for Wythoff generalizations (extremely generalized, so generalizations of generalizations of generalizations of Wythoff) using a numeration system based on continuing fractions.  Aviezri used this to show that one class of games studied by Wei An Liu and Haiyan Li has a polynomial-time solution to differentiate between P and N positions.  Best quote by Aviezri: "33 years ago, I proved..."

Melissa Huggan spoke about Intersection-Restriction games.  She's been studying Arc Kayles, which is just like Node Kayles, except that players choose edges, which are removed along with their neighbors.  She's written code to analyze star graphs with three rays.  (The rays are not restricted to path of length 1; otherwise each star is just equal to *.)  She's also analyzing wheel graphs.  In arc Kayles, playing on a spoke of a wheel turns the graph into a path, while taking an edge on the rim turns it into something that resembles a pizza.

As Melissa said, it's "computationally expensive because we need all subpositions of the pizzas!"

After this, she showed some work on triple-packing and triple-overlapping games.  She has Grundy values for games played on {1, ..., n} up to n = 10.  She's very interested in continuing work on this, but for the 10 case the running time of her code jumped from 8 seconds to 17 minutes!  So far, her data matches the Grundy sequence of arc kayles on complete graphs.  (Edit: I originally read her table as 8 minutes to 17 hours, but I was corrected, and these are the correct times.)

Urban Larsson spoke on some new work on scoring games.  He mentioned the term "Galgemster", which is apparently a gamester who is more interested in algebra. :)

His talk concentrated on finding a subuniverse of scoring games that could be analyzed nicely.  He called these games Guaranteed.

Carlos Santos then spoke about Absolute CGT.  He wants to figure out analytical tools that will work for many universes of games: Normal-play, misere, and scoring games.  He defines the term CG space, which must have nice properties for recursion, order, an operation (e.g. disjunctive sum), and atomic positions.  With this definition, he is able to find "Absolute Theorems" which can then be applied to any space.

Thane was very excited about this joint work by Carlos and Urban and Richard Nowakowski.  As he said, "I love this talk!  Can I now talk, for, like, 30 seconds?"

Gabriel Renault spoke on comparison modulo sets of games.  Unfortunately I don't follow all the monad arguments well, but I did learn some new terms:

* A binary position is one in which each player has no more than one option (and all options are also binary).

* A dicot game is the same as an all-small position.  However, "dicot" is more commonly used under misere play.

Craig Tennenhouse then spoke about his joint work with me on games that use data structures, as described in an undergraduate CS data structures course.  He got lots of interest from people after describing Rotisserie Nim, which is Nim played on a queue.  We noticed that there's an optimal strategy to follow, but the strategy does not actually tell us the outcome class without simulating the entire game.

I played some more great games today!  I'm hoping to test out my Clobbineering skills again tonight!

CGTC1, Day 0

Arrived last night in Lisbon, traveling with Craig Tennenhouse from UNE for CGTC1: CGT Colloquium I.  It's great to see so many people I know and lots of new faces too.

Gathering with gamesters is dangerous.  Last night I chose games over sleep and stayed up a bit too late.  I did get in some games of Amazons (with three players), Clobbineering, Yavalath (also with 3), and FLex (Follow-the-Leader Hex).  Michael Fisher has some beautiful sets from Nestor Games.  Perfect for travel.  They're a bit expensive to get in the US, but they might be worth it!

I'm looking forward to Craig's talk today, as well as others.  Craig and I spent most of the time on the last flight feverishly trying to solve Rotisserie Nim, but it's not clear what our analysis will yield.

There's a chance that Clobbineering will be dubbed the official "game" of this conference.  We'll see!  It was certainly the first time Urban, Tristan, or Svenja had played it, but that keep me from losing most of my games.

After over a year, it's great to be back in the CGT action!