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Nonlinear Dynamics In Combinatorial Games: Renormalizing Chomp, Eric J. Friedman, Adam S. Landsberg
Nonlinear Dynamics In Combinatorial Games: Renormalizing Chomp, Eric J. Friedman, Adam S. Landsberg
WM Keck Science Faculty Papers
We develop a new approach to combinatorial games that reveals connections between such games and some of the central ideas of nonlinear dynamics: scaling behaviors, complex dynamics and chaos, universality, and aggregation processes. We take as our model system the combinatorial game Chomp, which is one of the simplest in a class of "unsolved" combinatorial games that includes Chess, Checkers, and Go. We discover that the game possesses an underlying geometric structure that "grows" (reminiscent of crystal growth), and show how this growth can be analyzed using a renormalization procedure adapted from physics. In effect, this methodology allows one to …