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Department of Mathematics,
University of California San Diego

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Food for Thought Seminar

Eric Tressler

UCSD, Graduate Student

The Devil's Strategy is to Give Up

Abstract:

The Angel lives on an infinite chessboard, and plays a game with the Devil. Each turn, the Devil removes a square; the Angel then flies up to 1000 king moves away, to any square still remaining on the board. Can the Devil trap the Angel? Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy introduced this game in 1982, and the Angel's fate remained conspicuously unknown until recent papers by four independent authors all showed that the Devil's cause is hopeless. One of the papers, by Andr\'{a}s M\'{a}th\'{e}, achieves this by considering a ``Nice Devil.'' This paper will be presented after some background is explored.

October 11, 2007

11:00 AM

AP&M B412

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