By Xinyu Sun
and Doron Zeilberger
Appeared in Annals of Combinatorics 8(2004), 225-238.
Written: Nov. 13, 2003.
The most famous Combinatorial (impartial) game is Nim.
It is also trivial, especially the 2-heap case.
In 1907 Wythoff suggested a very interesting variation
on 2-heap Nim, that added an extra move: take the same amount
from both piles. A few years ago, the great Combinatorial Gamer,
Aviezri Fraenkel, suggested a natural generalization of
Wythoff's game to many piles, where the moves are given by
"Losing Nim-Positions", and made interesting conjectures
about the losing positions. Here we prove Fraenkel's conjectures
for three piles, with the smallest pile of size less than eleven.
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