Urban Larsson, an Associate Professor at IEOR IIT Bombay in India, will talk about his work and life as a professor at IIT Bombay and present his research on bidding combinatorial games.
Overview
The event has passed
- Date:Starts 12 June 2023, 14:00Ends 12 June 2023, 15:00
- Location:Analysen, EDIT building
- Language:English
Abstract
1. Work and life as a professor at IIT Bombay, India
He will share my experiences working as an associate professor at IEOR, IIT Bombay, India. They are currently recruiting.
2. Bidding combinatorial games
Recent research generalises alternating normal play to bidding play, via Discrete Richman Auctions(Develin et al. 2010, Larsson et al. 2021, Lazarus et al. 1996). A given total budget, a nonnegative integer, is split between the two players. At each stage of a game, they bid for the privilege to play. The player who wins the bid hands over the winning bid to the other player. A marker differentiatesbetween ties. Zugzwangs are possible, and indeed the 0-total budget corresponds to alternating normal-play. The outcomes are vectors that indicate who wins in perfect play, given any split of the total budget. We describe the feasible outcomes and prove that they all appear as game forms. We have managed to obtain a constructive comparison test for any given total budget. By using this test, we prove various structure results. In particular, for any total budget, numbers, integers, and dyadic rationals are subgroups of the larger monoid. This is joint work with Kant, Larsson, Rai and Upasany.
A brief intro to Combinatorial Game Theory:
Combinatorial games are alternating play win-loss games, where the win-loss condition is reflected in the movability of the current player: e.g. in normal-play, a player who is not able to move loses. Examples: Nim, Wythoff Nim, Subtraction Games, Kayles, Dawson's Chess, Hackenbush, Domineering, Toppling Dominoes, Clobber, etc. Theoretical studies are motivated by traditional recreational rulesets such as Chess, Go and Checkers. Games are naturally added by using the disjunctive sum operator. And the normal-play convention induces a rich additive structure, with huge equivalence classes; for example each previous player win position is equivalent to the neutral element. Recommended literature: Aaron Siegel, Combinatorial Game Theory (2013).
About the speaker
Urban Larsson is an Associate Professor at IEOR IIT Bombay in India since February 2022. Before that he had research fellow positions at the National University of Singapore, the Technion Israel, and Dalhousie University, Canada. Before that he was a lecturer in Mathematics and a 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 2018-2023). His main contributions find bridges between combinatorial games and neighbouring disciplines. 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 two Games of No Chance volumes (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), organised by Dr. C. P. dos Santos University of Lisbon.
Homepage: urbanlarsson.mine.nu
Email: larsson@iitb.ac.in
This is a seminar from the DSAI seminars series held every Monday at 14:00 by the Data Science and AI division. The seminars are usually hybrid.
