One Pile
One Pile is the most direct generalization of Scoring and the simplest of the Subtraction games. On each move a player is permitted to remove any number of objects bounded both from above and below. (In the applet, a move is performed by pressing one of the buttons located on the perimeter of the drawing area. The Min and Max attributes can be modified by clicking a little off their central line.)
Some theory
Copyright © 1996-2010 Alexander Bogomolny
Theory of One Pile
The Grundy numbers for the various sizes of the pile are easily found with the Mex rule. For example, for Min = 3 and Max = 5, we get
| Pile size | | 0 | | 1 | | 2 | | 3 | | 4 | | 5 | | 6 | | 7 | | 8 | | 9 | | 10 | | 11 | | 12 | | 13 | | 14 | | 15 | | 16 | | 17 | | 18 | | 19 | | 20 |
| Grundy number | | 0 | | 0 | | 0 | | 1 | | 1 | | 1 | | 2 | | 2 | | 0 | | 0 | | 0 | | 1 | | 1 | | 1 | | 2 | | 2 | | 0 | | 0 | | 0 | | 1 | | 1 |
The P-positions correspond to the piles whose size S falls into the range 0 S mod (Min + Max) < Min.
Copyright © 1996-2010 Alexander Bogomolny
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