Saturday, August 15, 2020

[abnlvuel] Speed nim

Although computing the winning strategy for Nim is quick and easy for a computer, it is not so easy for a human to do in his or her head if the game is large.

This suggests making it a game to be played at high speed (like blitz chess) between humans.  What heuristics might not always be accurate but are quick to calculate?  Can you swindle a win from a lost position by making it difficult for your opponent to find the right move?

Perhaps nim is not a very popular game because useful heuristics haven't been discovered.  What happens if we apply machine learning?

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

I'm curious to know how you would suggest setting up a machine learning problem to optimize for heuristics that a human can do quickly in their head. Is the idea that you'd make that an explicit goal of the algorithm, or just that you'd use an interpretable algorithm and see what heuristics it learns?