A Generalized Diagonal Wythoff Nim
Abstract
In this paper we study a family of 2-pile Take Away games, that we denote by Generalized Diagonal Wythoff Nim (GDWN). The story begins with 2-pile Nim whose sets of options and -positions are and respectively. If we to 2-pile Nim adjoin the main-\emph{diagonal} as options, the new game is Wythoff Nim. It is well-known that the -positions of this game lie on two 'beams' originating at the origin with slopes and . Hence one may think of this as if, in the process of going from Nim to Wythoff Nim, the set of -positions has \emph{split} and landed some distance off the main diagonal. This geometrical observation has motivated us to ask the following intuitive question. Does this splitting of the set of -positions continue in some meaningful way if we, to the game of Wythoff Nim, adjoin some new \emph{generalized diagonal} move, that is a move of the form , where are fixed positive integers and ? Does the answer perhaps depend on the specific values of and ? We state three conjectures of which the weakest form is: exists, and equals , if and only if is a certain \emph{non-splitting pair}, and where represents the set of -positions of the new game. Then we prove this conjecture for the special case (a \emph{splitting pair}). We prove the other direction whenever . In the Appendix, a variety of experimental data is included, aiming to point out some directions for future work on GDWN games.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1005.1555,
title = {A Generalized Diagonal Wythoff Nim},
author = {Urban Larsson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.1555},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
38 pages, 34 figures