Subtitle: Making the Right Connections
The game Hex, which can be explained in a paragraph and played on (say) bathroom tiles, is quite hard despite being perfectly deterministic; like Go. (Not that I can beat the Java applet version; maybe after I read the book, which is mostly about strategy with a lot of alternate versions of the game, including Hex on a torus.)
John Nash was one of the two simultaneous inventors, so in English the game was called "Nash" for a while except when played on those bathroom tiles, when it was called "John".
Odd that two people should have come up with such a simple game at once. (The other is Piet Hein.) Browne points out that it has a little to do with the four-color problem, too, in a metaphorical, simplifying way. It's more directly descended from game versions of maintaining or destroying network (circuit) connectivity.
ISBN: 1568811179
So wrote clew in Math. | TrackBack