> 4:15PM, Wednesday, October 16, 2002
> NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
> http://ee380.stanford.edu[1]
>
>Topic: QUANTITATIVE GO, AND SOME OTHER COMBINATORIAL GAMES
>
>Speaker: A LECTURE BY PROF. ELWYN BERLEKAMP
> University of California at Berkeley
>
>
>About the talk:
>
>Combinatorial game theory is concerned with two-person
>perfect-information games, especially those classes of positions
>for which winning strategies can be stated explicitly, or at
>least proved to exist. The powerful mathematical methods (often
>requiring only paper and pencil, no computers) are most
>successful when applied to games whose positions often decompose
>into "sums". The many examples of such games include Nim, Dots
>and Boxes, Hackenbush (best played with colored chalk and
>erasures), Domineering (played with dominoes on a checkerboard),
>Konane (popular in ancient Hawaii), Amazons (invented less than
>fifteen years ago, but which has attracted a substantial
>following on the Internet), and Go (a popular Asian board game
>dating back several thousand years, and which supports nearly
>2,000 active professionals today). The theory also applies very
>well to the fascinating new game called "Clobber", invented in
>Nova Scotia in the summer of 2001.
>
>In many of these games, a mathematically defined "temperature"
>provides a numerical measure of the value of the next move. The
>extension of this notion to loopy positions, such as kos in Go,
>appeared in "Games of No Chance" in 1996. A subsequent extension,
>called "Environmental Go", includes a stack of coupons in
>addition to the Go board. This has led to fruitful collaborations
>between game theoreticians and professional 9-dan Go players. For
>the past four years, we have been developing methods and
>techniques which allow us to get rigorous analyses of the last 50
>to 100 moves of some professional games, and we not infrequently
>discover fatal mistakes.
>
>We will present a broad introductory overview of this subject,
>including a fascinating problem in which Go, chess, checkers, and
>domineering are all played concurrently.
>
>The time may now be ripe for new efforts to combine modern
>mathematical game theory with alpha-beta pruning and other
>traditional AI minimax search techniques.
>
>About the speaker:
>
>Elwyn Berlekamp has been Professor of Mathematics and of
>Electrical Engineering/Computer Science at UC Berkeley since
>1971. He was associate chairman of EECS for computer science at
>Berkeley in 1975-77. In the late 1980s he also served four years
>on the UC President's Science Advisory Committee for Los Alamos
>and Livermore National Laboratories.
>
>In the early 1980s, Berlekamp took industrial leaves and reduced
>his faculty appointment to part-time to pursue off-campus
>ventures. He was founder and president of Cyclotomics, which was
>acquired by Eastman Kodak in 1985 and renamed "Kodak Berkeley
>Research", and a cofounder of several other successful companies,
>including IC Designs and Cylink. (NASDAQ: CYLK)
>
>Berlekamp has 12 patented inventions (now all public domain),
>mostly dealing with algorithms and devices for synchronization
>and error-correction. He has nearly 100 publications, including 2
>books on algebraic coding theory and 4 books on the mathematical
>theory of combinatorial games, the most recent of which is "The
>Dots and Boxes Game", recently published by AK Peters. This book
>will be featured in Scientific American's January 2001 issue.
>National Academy of Engineering, and of the American Academy of
>Arts and Sciences. From 1994-1998, he was chairman of the board
>of trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
>(MSRI).
>
>Since 1991, Berlekamp's primary research interest has been
>extensions of the mathematical theory of games and applications
>to Go. He chaired the organizing committee of a workshop at MSRI
>in July 2000, about which more information can be found at
>www.msri.org.
>
>Contact information:
>
>Elwyn Berlekamp berlek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx[2]
>Hazelnut
>64 Shattuck Square, Suite 212e
>Berkeley, CA 94704
>Pnone: (510) 849-4214
>Web: http://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/[3]
>
>
>Embedded Links:
>[ 1 ] http://ee380.stanford.edu
>[ 2 ] berlek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx