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Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 in the University of Cambridge by John Conway and Michael Paterson. The game starts with p spots, and ends in at most 3p-1 moves. The first player who cannot play loses. The complexity of the p-spot game is very high, so that the best hand-checked proof only shows who the winner is for the 7-spot game, and the best previous computer analysis reached p=11. We have written a computer program, using mainly two new ideas. The nimber (also known as Sprague-Grundy number) allows us to compute separately independent subgames; and when the exploration of a part of the game tree seems to be too difficult, we can manually force the program to search elsewhere. Thanks to these improvements, we reached up to p=32. The outcome of the 33-spot game is still unknown, but the biggest computed value is the 47-spot game ! All the computed values support the Sprouts conjecture: the first player has a winning strategy if and only if p is 3, 4 or 5 modulo 6. We have also used a check algorithm to reduce the number of positions needed to prove which player is the winner. It is now possible to hand-check all the games until p=11 in a reasonable amount of time.
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This article concerns the resolution of impartial combinatorial games, and in particular games that can be split in sums of independent positions. We prove that in order to compute the outcome of a sum of independent positions, it is always more efficient to compute separately the nimbers of each independent position than to develop directly the game tree of the sum. The concept of nimber is therefore inevitable to solve impartial games, even when we only try to determinate the winning or losing outcome of a starting position. We also describe algorithms to use nimbers efficiently and finally, we give a review of the results obtained on two impartial games: Sprouts and Cram.
Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 by Michael Paterson and John Conway. The game starts with p spots drawn on a sheet of paper, and lasts at most 3p-1 moves: the player who makes the last move wins. Sprouts is a very intricate game and the best known manual analysis only achieved to find a winning strategy up to p=7 spots. Recent computer analysis reached up to p=32. The standard game is played on a plane, or equivalently on a sphere. In this article, we generalize and study the game on any compact surface. First, we describe the possible moves on a compact surface, and the way to implement them in a program. Then, we show that we only need to consider a finite number of surfaces to analyze the game with p spots on any compact surface: if we take a surface with a genus greater than some limit genus, then the game on this surface is equivalent to the game on some smaller surface. Finally, with computer calculation, we observe that the winning player on orientable surfaces seems to be always the same one as on a plane, whereas there are significant differences on non-orientable surfaces.
A special class of Jordan algebras over a field $F$ of characteristic zero is considered. Such an algebra consists of an $r$-dimensional subspace of the vector space of all square matrices of a fixed order $n$ over $F$. It contains the identity matrix, the all-one matrix; it is closed with respect to correction{matrix transposition}, Schur-Hadamard (entrywise) multiplication and the Jordan product $A*B=frac 12 (AB+BA)$, where $AB$ is the usual matrix product. The suggested axiomatics (with some natural additional requirements) implies an equivalent reformulation in terms of symmetric binary relations on a vertex set of cardinality $n$. The appearing graph-theoretical structure is called a Jordan scheme of order $n$ and rank $r$. A significant source of Jordan schemes stems from the symmetrization of association schemes. Each such structure is called a non-proper Jordan scheme. The question about the existence of proper Jordan schemes was posed a few times by Peter J. Cameron. In the current text an affirmative answer to this question is given. The first small examples presented here have orders $n=15,24,40$. Infinite classes of proper Jordan schemes of rank 5 and larger are introduced. A prolific construction for schemes of rank 5 and order $n=binom{3^d+1}{2}$, $din {mathbb N}$, is outlined. The text is written in the style of an essay. The long exposition relies on initial computer experiments, a large amount of diagrams, and finally is supported by a number of patterns of general theoretical reasonings. The essay contains also a historical survey and an extensive bibliography.
There exists many complicated $k$-noncrossing pseudoknot RNA structures in nature based on some special conditions. The special characteristic of RNA structures gives us great challenges in researching the enumeration, prediction and the analysis of prediction algorithm. We will study two kinds of typical $k$-noncrossing pseudoknot RNAs with complex structures separately.
We consider a constrained version of the shortest path problem on the complete graphs whose edges have independent random lengths and costs. We establish the asymptotic value of the minimum length as a function of the cost-budget within a wide range.
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