Introductions to Popular Combinatorial Games
Global Overview for Teachers
Rules of 5 Games
Hackenbush
Dots and Boxes
Strings and Coins Duality
Amazons
Impartial Chess
Domineering
Konane
Fox and Geese
Clobber
Concluding Overview
Distinguished Lectures
Mathematics and Go, February 6, 2006, Berkeley
This DVD is a recording of a presentation Berlekamp gave on February
6, 2006 at the Faculty Club of the University of California at
Berkeley. The audience consisted of a very select group, including
several Nobel Prize winners. Some members of the audience had almost
no prior knowledge of Go.
Following a 4 minute introduction by Berkeley's Dean of Letters &
Science Mark Richards, Berlekamp's 27 minute talk gives a fascinating
high-level overview of both Go and mathematics, including both history
and some
of the recently discovered connections between them. It is followed by
a questions and answer period and a bibliography.
The Game of Amazons, August 4, 2015, Momath
On August 3-4, 2015, the Museum of Mathematics (Momath) in New York sponsored a conference honoring Elwyn Berlekamp, Richard Guy, and John Conway, the authors of "Winning Ways". The conference was held at Baruch College, and was one of the conferences in Momath's long-term MOVES series (Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects). This DVD is the lecture Berlekamp gave at the conclusion of that conference.
The title might also have been "The Mathematics of Amazons" or the more general "The Mathematics of Games".
Following the presentation of the play of a particular game of Amazons on a 6x6 board, the lecture provides a post-mortem analysis which reveals the last fatal mistake, and the position at which the game on the board splits into the sum of two disjoint battles. The introduction of coupons facilitates the analysis of each battle separately, and provides insights into good play in their combined sum. Similar use of coupons facilitates "orthodox" analysis of several other "hot" combinatorial games, including the Asian board game called Go.
Popular Misconceptions, April 5, 2013, Stanford
On the occasion of Prof. Thomas Kailath's 70th Birthday in 2005, a group of his former students and associates endowed a fund to support an annual lecture at Stanford University by a distinguished contributor of mathematics-based solutions to challenging problems in engineering. Elwyn Berlekamp was the 2013 Kailath Lecturer.
Following Tom Kailath's introduction, Berlekamp discusses four "Popular Misconceptions" about applications of mathematics and probability: 1) confusing "average" with "typical," 2) underestimating variance, 3) overuse of integers, and 4) simplistic quantization. In the last portion of the lecture, Berlekamp sketches a more sophisticated "Stretched String" quantization methodology. This technique can be used to characterize the output stream from a Poisson process whose dynamic mean changes with time, incurring occasional big jumps as well as gradual drifts. In many situations, it offers more insight than traditional "moving averages." Applications include studies of accident rates and of financial data.
Gallimaufry of Games, 2000, updated in 2018
Winning Ways, circa 1986, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
This is an unedited recording of a lecture Berlekamp gave to an audience of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory circa 1986. It is an introduction to Combinatorial Game Theory, and a promotion of "Winning Ways", whose first edition, then consisting of two volumes of two parts each, had been published in 1982. Lecture aids included a blackboard with colored chalk and an overhead projector with transparencies, as was common at that time.
Adventures in Coding, Spring 2011, University of Southern California (UNEDITED)
This was the annual "Viterbi Lecture" at USC.
Recreational Mathematics, Fall 1976, Miami University, Oxford, OH
Obituaries