Dr. Justin James to present today’s Undergraduate Math Seminar

Wednesday, Feb. 8 | 4-4:50 p.m. | Bridges 268

Featuring Justin James | Analyzing NIM Games 

In the game NIM, two players take turns removing “stones” from one or more “piles.” In the standard version, the player who removes the last stone is declared the winner. In this talk we will discuss how a “backward reasoning strategy” and some straightforward divisibility conditions can be used to determine the optimal strategy and the correct move to play at each step in several different variants of NIM.