Games of No Chance

'No one interested in two-person combinatorial games should hesitate before acquiring this splendid book. Leading experts report on the latest research involving such classic board games as checkers, chess, and go. Other familiar games are analyzed in depth, and many exciting new games are introduced. Did you know that go moku, nine-men morris, and Sol Golomb's pentomino game are now solved? Did you know that computers are getting close to solving checkers? Fifty-two tantalizing unsolved problems are posed by Richard Guy, and Aviezri Fraenkel's bibliography lists 666 references! Games of No Chance is a great collection of elegant, entertaining papers - a book to put on the shelf alongside the classic two-volume Winning Ways by Elwyn Berlekamp, John Conway, and Richard Guy.' Martin Gardner

• Part I. All Games Bright and Beautiful: 1. The angel problem John H. Conway; 2. Scenic trails ascending from sea-level Nim to Alpine chess Aviezri Fraenkel; 3. What is a game? Richard K. Guy; 4. Impartial games Richard K. Guy; 5. Championship-level play of dots-and-boxes Julian West; 6. Championship-level play of domineering Julian West; 7. The gamesman's toolkit David Wolfe; Part II. Strides on Classical Ground: 8. Solving Nine Men's Morris Ralph Gasser; 9. Marion Tinsley: human perfection at checkers? Jonathan Schaeffer; 10. Solving the game of checkers Jonathan Schaeffer and Robert Lake; 11. On numbers and endgames: combinatorial game theory in chess endgames Noam D. Elkies; 12. Multilinear algebra and chess endgames Lewis Stiller; 13. Using similar positions to search game trees Yasuhito Kawano; 14. Where is the 'Thousand-Dollar Ko'? Elwyn Berlekamp and Yonghoan Kim; 15. Eyespace values in Go Howard A. Landman; 16. Loopy games and Go David Moews; 17. Experiments in computer Go endgames Martin Müller and Ralph Gasser; Part III. Taming the Menagerie: 18. Sowing games Jeff Erickson; 19. New toads and frogs results Jeff Erickson; 20. X-dom: a graphical, x-based front-end for domineering Dan Garcia; 21. Infinitesimals and coin-sliding David Moews; 22. Geography played on products of directed cycles Richard J. Nowakowski and David G. Poole; 23. Pentominoes: a first player win Hilarie K. Orman; 24. New values for top entails Julian West; 25. Take-away games Michael Zieve; Part IV. New Theoretical Vistas: 26. The economist's view of combinatorial games Elwyn Berlekamp; 27. Games with infinitely many moves and slightly imperfect information (extended abstract) David Blackwell; 28. The reduced canonical form of a game Dan Calistrate; 29. Error-correcting codes derived from combinatorial games Aviezri Fraenkel; 30. Tutoring strategies in game-tree search (extended abstract) Hiroyuki Iida, Yoshiyuki Kotani and Jos W. H. M. Uiterwijk; 31. About David Richman James G. Propp; 32. Richman games Andrew J. Lazarus, Daniel E. Loeb, James G. Propp and Daniel Ullman; 33. Stable winning coalitions Daniel E. Loeb; Part V. Coda: 34. Unsolved problems in combinatorial games Richard K. Guy; 35. Combinatorial games: selected bibliography with a succinct gourmet introduction Aviezri Fraenkel.