[HN Gopher] Transfinite NIM (the game, not the programming langu...
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Transfinite NIM (the game, not the programming language)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-02-06 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jdh.hamkins.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jdh.hamkins.org)
| lblume wrote:
| Nim is, in fact, a proper subset of Hackenbush, a game
| extensively studied by Conway. I found the following video
| extremely useful and well-visualized:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYj4NkeGPdM
| ykonstant wrote:
| The author's previous post on winning strategies for regular Nim
| may be more interesting to people here:
| https://jdh.hamkins.org/win-at-nim-the-secret-mathematical-s...
| demaga wrote:
| Yes, thank you! I had a lot of fun playing around with Nim and
| other mathematical games after I watched [talk on surreal
| numbers by Tom
| Hall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpXoluxBYw0). But the
| transfinite version went completely over my head.
|
| Also, I find it funny that reading about Nim is how I learned
| the term misere, even though I played lots of misere games
| before without realizing!
| 998244353 wrote:
| Here's another (seemingly finite) problem being analyzed with the
| same "Nim but with ordinal numbers" approach:
| https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/85984
| rubenvanwyk wrote:
| Came here and thought this going to be about the Nim programming
| language.
| ColinWright wrote:
| OK, I've edited the title to make it clearer that this is about
| the mathematical game and not the programming language.
| dvh wrote:
| Mathematicians use term "game" how physicists use term
| "momentum".
| gjm11 wrote:
| Could you be a bit more explicit?
|
| (My understanding of how physicists use the term "momentum":
| they use it to describe a particular precisely defined
| physically meaningful quantity, which plays an important role
| in physics. This seems like an entirely reasonable, even
| admirable thing. But there seems to be a tone of disapproval
| in what you say. The obvious complaint about mathematicians'
| use of "game" would be something like: they took an ordinary
| word with an ordinary everyday meaning and used it to mean
| something weird and technical. But that's absolutely not what
| physicists do with "momentum"; the everyday uses are _derived
| from_ the physicists ' term.[1] So I'm confused.)
|
| [1] There are actually pre-physics meanings of "momentum" but
| they are long dead . E.g., it could once mean 1/40 of an
| hour.
| dvh wrote:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=edXOIJZrLPo
| fragmede wrote:
| Also not Nvidia Inference Microservices
|
| https://build.nvidia.com/explore/discover
| pmarreck wrote:
| FWIW, Nim (the programming language) is certainly interesting and
| possibly underrated.
|
| https://nim-lang.org/
| yardshop wrote:
| It's nice that Nim the Language is getting well enough known that
| it needs to be specifically differentiated from something!
| klik99 wrote:
| My grandpa was a fan of Nim, and at restaurants we'd play with
| sugar packets while waiting for food. It's a great game to
| entertain kids. He also invented Dr. Nim which some gray beards
| may be familiar with. Turing Tumble is an evolution of Dr.
| Nim/DigiComp II.
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