Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
Positional games is a branch of Combinatorics, studying deterministic two player zero sum games with perfect information, played usually on discrete or even finite boards. Among other, positional games include the popular games Tic-Tac-Toe and Hex as opposed to abstract games played on graphs and hypergraphs. This subject is strongly related to other branches of Combinatorics such as Ramsey Theory, Extremal Graph Theory and the Probabilistic Method. In this mini course we introduce the subject and its basic notions; learn some classical results in the field; discuss few general known tools as long as possible extensions; sketch some recent research results and talk about some interesting open problems in the field.
Sponsor(s): Mathematics
Contact: Asaf Ferber, 2-246A, ferbera@mit.edu
| Jan/17 | Tue | 10:00AM-12:00PM | 4-153 |
A brief introduction to the subject. The game of HEX, Tic-Tac-Toe, Shannon's switching game, strategy stealing, Ramsey-Type games and more.
| Jan/19 | Thu | 10:00AM-12:00PM | 4-153 |
Weak games, the conditional expectation method (the Erdos-Selfridge Theorem), biased games and strong games.