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Monthly Archives: May 2017
AlphaGo
Many of my readers may have already heard about AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind which plays the ancient board game of Go. Developing a program to play Go is not that big of a deal—the first such … Continue reading
Post without words #17
Posted in pattern, pictures, posts without words
Tagged diagrams, sets, subsets, symmetry, venn
5 Comments
Computing optimal play for the greedy coins game, part 4
Last time I explained a method for computing best play for instances of the greedy coins game, which is feasible even for large games. This general approach is known as dynamic programming and is applicable whenever we have some recursively … Continue reading
Posted in computation, games, recursion
Tagged coins, dynamic, game, optimal, play, programming, proof, recurrence, strategy, tree, two-player, zero-sum
Comments Off on Computing optimal play for the greedy coins game, part 4
Computing optimal play for the greedy coins game, part 3
In a previous post we saw how we can organize play sequences in the greedy coins game into a tree. Then in the last post, we saw how to work our way from the bottom of the tree upward and … Continue reading
Posted in computation, games, recursion
Tagged coins, game, optimal, play, proof, recurrence, strategy, tree, two-player, zero-sum
2 Comments
Computing optimal play for the greedy coins game, part 2
I want to explain in more detail how we can think about computing the best possible score for Alice in the greedy coins game, assuming best play on the part of both players. I glossed over this too quickly in … Continue reading
Posted in computation, games, recursion
Tagged coins, game, optimal, play, proof, recurrence, strategy, tree, two-player, zero-sum
1 Comment
Computing optimal play for the greedy coins game
Recall the greedy coins game, in which two players alternate removing one of the coins from either end of a row, and the player with the highest total at the end is the winner. What if we wanted to play … Continue reading
Posted in computation, games, recursion
Tagged coins, dynamic programming, game, optimal, play, proof, recurrence, strategy, two-player, zero-sum
2 Comments
The Math Less Traveled 