Traditional game theory has been successful at developing strategy in games of incomplete information: when one player knows something that the other does not. But it has little to say about games of complete information, for example, tic-tac-toe, solitaire and hex. The main challenge of combinatorial game theory is to handle combinatorial chaos, where brute force study is impractical. In this comprehensive volume, József Beck shows readers how to escape from the combinatorial chaos via the fake probabilistic method, a game-theoretic adaptation of the probabilistic method in combinatorics. Using this, the author is able to determine the exact results about infinite classes of many games, leading to the discovery of some striking new duality principles. Available for the first time in paperback, it includes a new appendix to address the results that have appeared since the book's original publication.
- ISBN13 9780521184755
- Publish Date 28 April 2011 (first published 1 January 2008)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 21 July 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Cambridge University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 750
- Language English