A Brief Introduction to COMBINATORIAL GAMES: Partial games - Impartial games - N,P-positioning analysis - Sprague-Grundy function analysis

The whole area of mathematics is divided into many mutually interconnected branches, which can be at some level studied separately. One of such branches is the Combinatorial game theory. This book consists of a description of combinatorial games and examples of both impartial and partisan games. It should provide the reader with good basics to understanding this area of mathematics, which is not very widespread. It is also a good way of getting familiar with the analysis of impartial games and their additions into more complex games. The very basics of analysis of partisan games are provided as well. The whole text should be considered as an introduction to the theory of combinatorial games. On the other hand, it can be understood as a guide to finding similarities between various combinatorial games. The reader should consequently be able to perform a basic analysis of a variety of these games, even those which are not mentioned in this book.

Matej Antol is a student of Applied Informatics at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He received his Bc. there in June 2011.