Conway's Games and Some of their Basic Properties
Robin Nittka · Formalized Mathematics · 2011
Conway's Games and Some of their Basic PropertiesWe formulate a few basic concepts of J. H. Conway's theory of games based on his book [6]. This is a first step towards formalizing Conway's theory of numbers into Mizar, which is an approach to proving the existence of a FIELD (i.e., a proper class that satisfies the axioms of a real-closed field) that includes the reals and ordinals, thus providing a uniform, independent and simple approach to these two constructions that does not go via the rational numbers and hence does for example not need the notion of a quotient field.In this first article on Conway's games, we provide a definition of games, their birthdays (or ranks), their trees (a notion which is not in Conway's book, but is useful as a tool), their negates and their signs, together with some elementary properties of these notions. If one is interested only in Conway's numbers, it would have been easier to define them directly, but going via the notion of a game is a more general approach in the sense that a number is a special instance of a game and that there is a rich theory of games that are not