Home Home  Article Index Article Index  
GuruPedia  

Sprague-Grundy theorem

The Sprague-Grundy theory of games is a theory of certain classes of games called impartial games, developed by R. P. Sprague and P. M. Grundy. It was originally developed for the game of nim.

It has been developed further by E. R. Berlekamp, John Horton Conway and others, and these developments are presented in the books Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and On Numbers and Games.

The theory states that every position in an impartial game can be assigned a Grundy number which makes it equivalent to a Nim heap of that size. The Grundy number of a position is also referred to as Nim-heap-number or nimber, for short.


This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it .

Popular Topics

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.  For the live article, click here.

Privacy