International Journal of Game Theory
in the area of Combinatorial Games
This CFP is also posted at
http://www.gametheorysociety.org/calls.html#cgt
The International Journal of Game Theory (IJGT) encourages
submissions of significant papers in Combinatorial Game
Theory, and has invited Aviezri Fraenkel to its Editorial
Board to deal with these submissions.
IJGT, founded in 1971, has a long tradition of publishing
papers in game theory with significant mathematical content.
Combinatorial Game Theory has developed into a field with
advanced mathematical and computational complexity
techniques and a number of challenging open questions, where
new results will nicely fit with and complement the scope of
IJGT.
Combinatorial games are typically two-player games with
perfect information and ``win'', ``lose'', and ``draw'' or
``tie'' as possible outcomes, and an underlying mathematical
structure. This is in contrast to games involving chance and
lack of information such as Poker, which are central to
``classical'' game theory.
A basic combinatorial game is Nim, given by a number of
heaps of chips where players alternately remove some chips
from one of those heaps, and the last player to move wins.
Over a century ago, it was shown how to play Nim optimally
using the binary representation of the heap sizes. This
method can be extended to ``impartial'' games where the
available moves from any position do not depend on the
player to move. An important algebraic structure is the
``sum'' of games where a player can move in one of several
independent parts of the game. Such decompositions are
important, for example, to improve algorithms for playing
endgames of the board game Go where humans still highly
outperform computers.
Recent progress in Combinatorial Game Theory concern
difficult questions on partizan (not impartial) games such
as chess, misère play (where the last player to move loses)
and interactions of game tokens, both of which conflict with
the ``sum'' of games, and computational hardness questions.
The classical book on combinatorial games is ``Winning
ways'' by Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy from 1982, recently
republished. As shown by Conway, all two-player games can be
constructed by a simple Dedekind-reminiscent cut, with a
rich mathematical theory. All real numbers are a subset of
the set of all games. Many challenging questions concern the
computational complexity of optimal play, given a particular
game specification.
Given the advanced development and mathematical depth of
Combinatorial Game Theory, its significant papers will be a
welcome contribution to IJGT. We hope that IJGT will be
considered as the premier publication outlet by the
Combinatorial Game Theory community.
Shmuel Zamir, Editor, and
Bernhard von Stengel, Co-Editor of IJGT
For further information and questions, please contact
Bernhard von Stengel at stengel@nash.lse.ac.uk
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