Winning with Confidence (Volume 1)

Author: (English) Berlekamp
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2003-11-30
Features: Preface: Does a book necessarily need a preface? Especially, after fifteen years of hard work, what more can three talented authors add? We want to tell readers heading to the bookstore: "Yes, this is exactly the book you want to buy!" We can guide you—if you want to quickly grasp the book's content, please turn to the last page of the preface and refer to pages 1,255,427, and 695. The reviewer will have to painstakingly delve into nearly a thousand pages of information-packed text, and we will provide them with concise and illuminating titles that highlight the main themes of the book. However, this is not an encyclopedia of games; while it has encyclopedic qualities, it is far from complete, leaving out many games. It is not a book solely about game mathematics, as it contains far too much serious mathematics. On the other hand, in our view, much like our predecessors, Rosser, Dudeney, Martin Gardner, Krechik, Sam Loyd, Euler, Tom Opie, and Fretz Schian, mathematics is, at its core, a game. It is not a textbook for university students, as the exercises are not arranged in the usual progressive manner—easy to difficult. Additionally, there are 163 deliberate errors placed throughout the book, providing ample room for readers to actively engage. So don’t just stand by as a spectator, cheering from the sidelines, even though it is indeed a highly artistic work. It is also not a textbook for college graduates, as it is expensive and contains far too much material, far exceeding the content any college graduate would need to study. But it can indeed bring you to the forefront of research in combinatorial game theory, with numerous unresolved problems to inspire further study.
We would like to thank Patrick Bownas for suggesting the book's title. This issue had been troubling us for some time. One morning on the way to school, John and Richard suddenly had the idea of "Whose Game?" as the book's title, but they realized it might not be strong enough (as it has at least three different meanings in English, not to mention other ambiguities). They finally settled on making it the title of the first chapter of the book, turning it into an inside joke. There isn’t enough space here to explain all the jokes in the book, even the 59 that are deeply personal (our birthdays appear in the book more than once). For the diligent reader, the initial jokes later gained momentum, becoming the "King of Hearts" in a deck of cards.
Louise Guy also helped proofread the proofs, but her greater contribution was her hospitality, allowing the three of us to have frequent opportunities to work together. After Karen McDermid and Betty Tierney completed many drafts, Louise took on the technical typing. We sincerely thank the numerous contributors who helped bring this book to fruition—their names are too many to list here, but you can get a rough idea from the surname index. To be truly fair and include everyone would require too much space, so we can only name a few: Richard Austin, Clive Bach, John Basley, Aviezri Fraenkel, David Frampton, Solomon Golomb, Stanford Granhen, Mike Guy, Dean Hickson, Hendrik Lenstra, Richard Nowakowski, Anne Scott, David Hill, John Selfridge, Sedgewick Smith, and Stanford Zeilberger.
The success of this book is especially owed to the thoughtful guidance of the knowledgeable and well-informed Ron Segevka, as well as the strong support of academic publishers and Peck Brothers. They accommodated some quirks of the authors: these guys never miss an opportunity to tweak grammar and semantics, twist the original text, misuse punctuation, change word spellings, insert many whimsical anagrams, and add plenty of inside jokes. We should also thank the Vinson Walton Keller Foundation for providing financial support, enabling Richard to serve as a resident researcher at the University of Calgary to complete the book. We also thank the National Research Council of Canada for providing funding, allowing Erwin and John to frequently visit and collaborate with Guy—unlike the authors, who, as usual, are like clouds and wild geese, rarely gathering together.