Richard J. Nowakowski
Dalhousie University, Canada

Abstract: Combinatorial Games as developed by John Conway (and Elwyn Berblekamp and Richard Guy) form an ordered abelian group. The most important point is that the last player to move wins. Unfortunately, the structure is too nice and many interesting features are hidden because different aspects have been knitted into one or two concepts. I'll present recent work by Larsson, Santos and the speaker that have untangled the knots. We show that many different types of combinatorial games (for example, Scoring and many Maker-Maker games) have similar good features and, along the way, we show that our mothers were correct when they told us "winning is not everything".

Seminário financiado por Fundos Nacionais através da FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia no âmbito do projeto UID/MAT/04721/2013.