Games, Graphs, and Computers: How to Win Without Actually Cheating
September 20, 2007
For the Landing Trail Intermediate School "Flying High!" Student Conference—not open to the general public.
Date & Time: 20 September 2007, four 70-minute presentations: 9:00 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 2:30 p.m.
Location: Computer Lab, Landing Trail Intermediate School, Athabasca, Alberta.
Synopsis: Learn how to solve puzzles and win games without actually cheating! Learn how to win against someone who doesn't know the best strategy. Simple examples are puzzles where you want to find a path that covers each edge of a figure (graph) exactly once without raising your pencil and games where players take turns choosing an edge of the graph or adding an edge to form a path from one given point to another.
For some games it helps to use a computer--and maybe convert them to video games from pencil and paper! We'll also have a quick look at "Game Theory", which applies to many problems you might not usually think of as games, such as whether it's best to always fight (hawk), or always run away (dove), or sometimes do one and sometimes the other. We'll work in the Computer Lab so we can see how this is done.
Science Outreach Athabasca - September 27, 2012
