The Computational Complexity of Games and Puzzles

The subject of my thesis is studying the algorithmic properties of one and two-player games people enjoy playing, such as chess or Sudoku. This research falls into a wider area known as combinatorial game theory. One of the main questions asked about games in this context is whether they are algorithmically tractable, that is, whether they can be solved with efficient algorithms. So far, more than fifty popular games have been categorized as intractable. This is probably because people enjoy games and puzzles for which designing a winning strategy or finding the solution requires some cleverness.

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