Nonstandard Analysis is usually used to introduce infinitesimals into the real numbers in an attempt to make arguments in analysis more intuitive. The idea is that you construct a superset which contains the reals and also some infinitesimals, prove that some statement holds of , and then use a general “transfer principle” to conclude that [...]
Entries from November 2008
November 9, 2008
Games Which are Impossible to Analyze
In the last post, I mentioned the computational complexity of various games. To be explicit, we consider each “game” to actually be a sequence of games for . For example, would be checkers played on an board. The problem was then to analyze the computational complexity of the function which takes and tells you which [...]
November 3, 2008
How to Show that Games are Hard
Peg Solitaire is a pretty popular game, often found in restaurants (including Cracker Barrel, if I remember correctly). It’s also NP-complete (by which I mean determining a winning strategy given the initial set-up is an NP-complete problem). You may have also heard of computational complexity results for Minesweeper (see here, for example). There are a [...]
