A game of nim is played with one pile of 30 tokens. The two player takes turns taking tokens off the pile. Whoever takes the last token wins.

To make the game a little more interesting, the rules have been changes slightly:
A player may take 1, 3, 4, or 5 tokens but not 2.

What is the best starting move and what is the general strategy?

Posting is giving me trouble today. If it's too long, when I click "post" I lose the message. So here's a shorter version, I can expand if there are questions.

Starting from the bottom you can tell that you don't want to get 2, 8, 10, 16, 18, or 24 chips or your opponent can win. In other words, always leave your opponent with that number of chips to choose from.

When you go first, take 1 chip (stick them with 24 - a bad number).

Rajal

Posted by Rajal on 2004-09-02 16:07:48