2020 Volume 14 Issue 1 Pages 28-43
In the fall of the last year, we finished the Japanese translation of the already classical masterpiece, “Winning Ways for Mathematical Plays” by E.R. Berlekamp, J.H. Conway and R.K. Guy into Japanese. On the occasion of SITA (Symposium of Information Theory and its Applications) 2019, Kirishima, I gave a lecture on Combinatorial Game Theory tributing Prof. Berlekamp who passed away on 9 April 2019, for his great achievements on Information Theory and Combinatorial Game Theory. Here I give an overview of CGT and related topics presented at the symposium. Combinatorial games are two-person games without any chance elements and with no hidden information. They include child's play such as Tic-Tac-Toe, and more deeper board games such as Go, Chess and Shogi. For your good plays, you need to know the values of game positions that are considered as the extended concept of numbers. We can observe the new idea on evaluating the positions such as the surreal numbers invented by Prof. Conway.
