The Gamesman's Toolkit
David Wolfe · 1997
Tired of all those hand calculations? Of converting to canonical forms? Of calculating means and temperatures? Of wondering if you've goofed? Wanted to play with the overheating operator, but don't have any patience? The Gamesman's Toolkit, written in C under UNIX, implements virtually all of the material in finite combinatorial game theory. It is invaluable in analyzing games, and in generating and testing hypotheses. Several of the results presented at the 1994 Combinatorial Games Workshop were discovered using this program. The Gamesman's Toolkit is useful and fun. This paper is an overview of its features. 1. Overview The Gamesman's Toolkit, written in C and running under UNIX, implements virtually all of the material in finite combinatorial game theory. The toolkit can be used in one of two ways: as a “games calculator”, by the gamesman who wishes to do standard algebraic manipulations on games; and as a programming toolkit, to analyze a particular game, for instance. A broad base of game-theoretic functions is provided, along with a parser and output routines. Either way, the program has proved to be a versatile and powerful tool for the student and the researcher. 2. Use As a Games Calculator Table 1 shows a sample run of the Toolkit, and gives an idea of its functionality as a games calculator. Here is the input notation, in a nutshell: • The caret, , represents ↑ ; the letter v is reserved for j ↓. Triple-up can be typed as either or 3. • You can assign variables to games and later reuse them. For example, you can set g = 2|1 and later reuse g in another expression.