Lessons in Play: An Introduction to Combinatorial Game Theory

Combinatorial games are games of pure strategy involving two players, with perfect information and no element of chance. Starting from the very basics of gameplay and strategy, the authors cover a wide range of topics, from game algebra to special classes of games. Classic techniques are introduced and applied in novel ways to analyze both old and new games, several appearing for the first time in this book.

Michael H. Albert is a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Otago, New Zealand.Previously he held positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Waterloo. He has authored many papers in game theory.Richard J. Nowakowski was born in Barnsley, England on March 29, 1952. He has been a professor at Dalhousie University since 1992. He has published over 75 papers in combinatorial game theory and graph theory as well as editing the proceedings of five combinatorial game theory conferences.David Wolfe received his Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1985. Since 1996 he has been an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Gustavus Adolphus College.