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HMC Senior Theses

91A46 Combinatorial games

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Exploring Winning Strategies For The Game Of Cycles, Kailee Lin Jan 2021

Exploring Winning Strategies For The Game Of Cycles, Kailee Lin

HMC Senior Theses

This report details my adventures exploring the Game of Cycles in search of winning strategies. I started by studying combinatorial game theory with hopes to use the Sprague-Grundy Theorem and the structure of Nimbers to gain insight for the Game of Cycles. In the second semester, I pivoted to studying specific types of boards instead. In this thesis I show that variations of the mirror-reverse strategy developed by Alvarado et al. in the original Game of Cycles paper can be used to win on additional game boards with special structure, such as lollipops, steering wheel locks, and 3-spoke trees. Additionally …