Lessons in Play

by Michael H. Albert, Richard J. Nowakowski, David Wolfe

This second edition of Lessons in Play reorganizes the presentation of the popular original text in combinatorial game theory to make it even more widely accessible. Starting with a focus on the essential concepts and applications, it then moves on to more technical material. Still written in a textbook style with supporting evidence and proofs, the authors add many more exercises and examples and implement a two-step approach for some aspects of the material involving an initial introduction, examples, and basic results to be followed later by more detail and abstract results. Features

Genres: Mathematics, Games

346 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2007

Reviews

[Andrew]

I bought the book after reading the first couple of chapters for free on Google Books. It's an extremely readable introduction to the field of Combinatorial Game Theory, the mathematics that seeks to explain luckless 2 player games like Chess and Go.

This is a textbook, so you'll need to be comfortable with mathematics and interested in the concepts - while you might gain minor insights into playing games and a better understanding of concepts you've encountered (eg sente and gote moves in Go), don't expect deep strategic or tactical Go revelations. Except dots-and-boxes (which I know as Paddocks) - the book discusses some serious dots-and-boxes strategy as an illustration of concepts.

I was amazed by how well diagrams and symbols were incorporated into the text: all the shapes used by the made-up games were printed right where they were needed in the middle of discursive paragraphs.

[Abanoub Ayaad · Rating 5 out of 5]

informative