If both players in a game of draughts stick to their optimal moves, the game will always end in a draw. You or I might have guessed that anecdotally. But being a mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy knows it for sure. The calculations that proved it took 200 desktop computers 18 years to perform.
The Prussian High Command used a game called Kriegsspiel to test the abilities of aspiring officers
When such a simple game produces such numerical complexity, imagine the fun a mathematician can have with something like Go, the Chinese institution whose number of possible games contains an estimated 300 digits....
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