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Mathematics for Game Designers

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week 3: check-in and resources

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If you've looked over the syllabus, you'll have seen that this week and the next *two* weeks concern various aspects of game theory.  There are a couple of free online resources about this topic listed in the syllabus - please feel free to follow up here with more!

For the moment, I'll list a couple of books that I found in the library that deal with games in different ways.

  • "On numbers and games" is a very mathematically sophisticated book.  The ideas have been used to analyse end-game positions in Go and mathematicians tend to rave about the book from a "pure theory" point of view.  That said, it isn't a very typical game theory book.  Maybe worth a *look* if it happens to be in at your library, but I wouldn't suggest buying it... http://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Games-John-H-Conway/dp/1568811276

As always, please post any exercises in our mathematics-enabled forum: http://metameso.org/vanilla/index.php.  I have an example that is sort of in between Week 2 and Week 3 material that I'll post shortly.

If you recall, the assignment for this week is to "analyze, to the extent possible, the game of your choice, using ideas from game theory." In a week's time maybe it is only fair to ask you to begin this process, but give it a go. Simple games are easier to analyze!!

Finally, for those of you who said you wanted to focus on programming -- please send an update letting us know how it's going!

Thanks,
Joe