Sprouts is a conference oriented towards undergraduate research in the analysis of games. The primary focus is Combinatorial Games, but Sprouts has a broad interest in all related fields. Sprouts is also a combinatorial game that is especially popular in the Netherlands. Our logo is a legal Sprouts position created from 15 points.
Combinatorial Game Theory is the mathematical study of turn-base games ("rulesets") where:
Many nice properties emerge from this, especially when we add games together. This conference is all about playing games, analyzing games, and even creating new games.
For a good introduction to Combinatorial Game Theory, we recommend these books:
This conference includes talks oriented towards undergrads, sessions for looking at unsolved problems, and both a human and computer game tournament. Prior knowledge of Combinatorial Game Theory is not necessary. (The first talk will cover much of the basics.) Although we expect the topics to be mostly applicable for Math and Computing students, everyone who enjoys abstract games is welcome!
There is no registration fee for Sprouts.
There is no cost to register for this conference. Email Kyle () to officially register. (It's still free!) Please include "Sprouts 2024 Registration" in the subject line of your email and let me know what your name and institution/organization are.
We are now accepting talk proposals. Preference will be given to talks by undergraduates and high-school students. All talks should be accessible to an undergraduate-level audience. Talk slots are usually 15 minutes long, and speakers should plan to talk for up to about 10 minutes, then answer questions for the remainder of the time.
To propose a talk, email your talk title and abstract to Kyle (). Please include whether you're an undergrad/grad student/professor/something else.
All times are listed in Eastern Time (ET). All events will take place on Zoom. The Zoom link will be made available to those who register.
Planned Events: (Talks get scheduled as they are accepted)
In this talk, we’ll introduce the notion of octal game and look at several examples. We’ll see that there’s at least one game on our list that you may already know. We will also look at some recent work done with games that are expressible using infinite octal codes. Finally, we’ll look at some ongoing research with three new games of this type.
Dive into the realm of Super Mario Bros as we unleash the power of reinforcement learning! In this talk I will present the process of using Deep-Q learning to enable Mario to beat the game by himself.
Everyone is familiar with Bouton’s solution to NIM yet it is mysterious, what in the world is the motivation behind considering Base 2 and the XOR function? In this talk we explore this question.
High-efficiency computation of subgame perfect equilibria in perfect-information, deterministic, extensive games through exhaustive search is often oriented towards specific rulesets. I present computational optimizations that are broadly applicable to the aforementioned class of extensive-form games, which are of course also relevant to the combinatorial case. In particular, I remark on techniques relating to parallelization, abstraction, hash functions, database systems, and interface design.
Snort is a two-player game played on a simple graph in which players alternately colour a vertex such that they do not colour adjacent to their opponent's vertex. It is known that the temperature of Snort in general is infinite (K_{1,n} has temperature n). We show that the temperature in addition can be infinitely larger than the degree of the board being played on. We do so by constructing a family of positions in which the temperature grows twice as fast as the degree of the board.
In 1995 the Firefighting problem was introduced by Bert Hartnell. The Firefighting problem is a process in which a specified number of fires breakout at vertices, and a given number of firefighters defend vertices in effort to contain the spreading flames. This presentation will survey established results related to fires spreading on various infinite graphs and grids.
In this talk, we introduce the theory of Combinatorial Games by taking the example of Blue-Red Hackenbush. We get a glimpse of how Surreal Numbers can be used to analyse a game of Red-Blue Hackenbush and try to construct Real numbers as a part of the Surreal number system. We also get a very brief mention of Green Hackenbush and its association with the game of Nim.
I will be presenting on Monte Carlo Tree Search, an aheuristic search algorithm commonly used in decision making, most notably in board games. I will present both the abstract, discussing the algorithm and the math behind it, as well as the practical, more specifically my implementation for Dr. Burke's combinatorial games website.
Cricket Pitch is a partisan game introduced by Nowakowski and Ottaway in 2010 as an example of a new class of games. This new class has the property that any position that a player can reach by 2 consecutive moves can also be reached by that player in just one move. They solved the normal play version and left the Misère version as an open problem. I will present some results on disjunctive sums of misère Cricket Pitch and introduce some other related problems. This is joint work with Richard Nowakowski.
In Quantum Leap, based on the classic Snakes and Ladders (without as much uncertainty and use of die), players move across an 8x8 grid, aiming to reach the opposite corner while navigating pitfalls, seizing quantum boosts, and employing two (maximum) quantum leaps to overcome obstacles. This presentation introduces the game's foundational mechanics, including the innovative use of quantum leaps that allow players to bypass traditional path constraints and the direct "kill" move that adds a layer of competitive interaction. We then explore the application of graph theory to model the game's grid as a network of possibilities and adversarial search techniques, such as Minimax with Alpha-Beta pruning and algorithms like Dijkstra's, to navigate this game. Through this examination, I hope to reveal the mathematical beauty and strategic intricacies that define the game, showcasing its contribution to combinatorial game theory and possible future AI-driven game development.
This year we'll be playing Gorgons! There are many ways to participate:
The main part of Sprouts 2024 will be held virtually.
Thanks to Florida Southern College Computer Science and University of New England Mathematics departments for supporting Sprouts 2024.
Other Combinatorial Games Conferences