Title: Relaxations of Combinatorial Games
Speakers: Dr. Urban Larsson, Visiting Associate Professor, IEOR, IIT Bombay.
Day, Date, Time: Thursday, 17th November, 2022, 10:30am-11:30am.
Venue: Teaching lab, Ground floor, IEOR Building.
Abstract: The motivation of Combinatorial Game Theory (CGT) is recreational games with open information and no chance, such as Chess, Go, Tic-Tac-Toe, Hex, Checkers and many more. The motivation of Classical Game Theory (EGT) is real world economical situations. Tools from CGT are yet rarely (if ever) used in EGT, and vice versa. We discuss relaxations of some of the conventions/axioms of CGT; in particular we study a generalization of alternating normal play (last move wins) to bidding normal play, via Discrete Richman Auctions; this is joint work with students from IEOR, IITB.
Speaker Bio: Urban Larsson is a Visiting Associate Professor at IEOR, IITB, and before that he had Research Fellow positions at the National University of Singapore, the Technion, Israel, and Dalhousie University, Canada, and before that he was a responsible lecturer in mathematics and Ph.D. student at Chalmers & University of Goteborg, Sweden. He was awarded Killam and Aly Kaufman fellowships. His main research areas are Game Theory, Number Theory, Discrete Mathematics, Computer Science and Algorithms. He publishes regularly (with 19 peer reviewed published papers in international journals in 2018-2022). His main contributions find bridges between combinatorial games and neighbouring desciplines. Urban has presented his research at more than 100 international conferences and seminars, he is an Associate Editor for International Journal of Game Theory, and he is the Editor of Games of No Chance (MSRI, CUP). He has co-organised several workshops in Combinatorial Game Theory: Games at Dal, with Prof. R. J. Nowakowski; Games at Carmel; at Ohio State University, with Dr. E. R. Roa; at IEOR, IITB, with Prof. M. Rao. And he is a member of the program committee for CGTC I, II and III, IV (Azores 2023), organized by Dr. C. P. dos Santos University of Lisbon.