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Department Seminar Speaker – Dr. David Molnar – “Connection Games”

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics would like to welcome:

Dr. David Molnar, Felician College, on Tuesday, April 22 at 4:00 pm in SCP 224.

Title: Connection Games

 Abstract: Connection games are a genre of abstract strategy games characterized by intuitive play and topological, rather than geometric, goals. The archetypical game in this genre is Hex, independently discovered by Piet Hein and John Nash in the 1940s. I will give a brief overview of the history of connection games, mixing in a tiny bit of strategy. The primary objective of the talk is to describe how to use graph theory to analyze games, and to prove that certain games cannot end in a draw. In particular, I will focus on a game called Atoll, a recent discovery that I find to be an improvement on Hex. I will provide pencil-and-paper game boards so that attendees will be able to explore these games further on their own.

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