Combinatorial Game Theory - CS50 Fair 2024 at Harvard

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Thomas and I'm here with lasia a first year student in Wigglesworth lasia is going to tell us a little bit about her project L what's your project called um it's about commentator Game Theory it's about commentator Game Theory and um it's just an implementation of a comment tutorial game with a little bit of information about the theory behind com tutorial games very cool and is it possible that we can see some sort of live demo or just demonstration of course so um so like the website first like walks a user through like what a Comal game is gives a little bit of information and motivation behind the theory um because it's just really a field of math dedicated to a specific type of game and then hacken bush is a game invented by John Horton Conway and um every time the page is reloaded it generates a new hacken Bush board um and the way that it works is like there's a left and a right player and left plays the blue sticks right plays the red sticks and each move the the player has to remove one of their own sticks and the first player to run out the sticks loses um so just like for an example like the winning strategy for this board while it looks complicated since if left goes first they just want to remove this bottom stick cuz then then the right player doesn't have any sticks left and then they win um now to reload the page okay so now here um like the left if left player starts again the right player might remove one of these sticks and then and so on fantastic yeah looks very cool yeah so um so so like with the way that the game works like you can set you can Define like a set theoretic way to notate games and from there you can construct a whole class of of of numbers using finite red and blue hacken Bush sticks that um can give that give rise to like a lot of really interesting things in commentator Game Theory where like the entire class of com of um comor games made from red and blue hackin Bush sticks um actually make a universal ordered field so very cool okay yeah I'm trying my head on this but it sounds very awesome L you thank you so much and lastly can you tell us like what inspired you to make this project so I was learning about comment tutorial Game Theory earlier in the semester for a direct reading program and I was playing the game just for just for fun because I also wanted to build some intuition around the theory so that I could like better analyze the games and I was having trouble finding like implementations online of games so I was like oh I should make my own for cs50 and hacken Bush is one of the first commentator games people learn when they're trying to learn the theory um so it was the one that I chose to make and then um later I think after the project I want I want to also work on implementations of nim and Chom which are two other commentator games that would analyz give rise to something called nimbers very cool fantastic L say thank you so much for showing us your project I'm Thomas and this is cs50