The Computer Scientist Who Finds Life Lessons in Games
The Computer Scientist Who Finds Life Lessons in Games
The Computer Scientist Who Finds Life Lessons in Games
By Ben Brubaker
January 25,2023
Summary
For Shang-Hua Teng, theoretical computer science has never been purely theoretical.
Now 58, Teng is a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and a two-time winner of the Gödel Prize, an annual award recognizing groundbreaking theoretical work.
Born in Beijing on the eve of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Teng came to the United States for graduate school planning to study computer architecture, but he soon changed direction to focus on more abstract mathematical theory.
More recently, Teng has turned his attention to the beautiful mathematics behind games like tic-tac-toe, chess and Go. In such "Combinatorial" games, there's no element of chance, and both players always know everything about the state of the board.
Combinatorial games remain challenging because the number of ways a game can play out might be dizzyingly large.
Game theory researchers like to generalize such games to ever larger boards - scaling up tic-tac-toe from 3-by-3 squares to n-by-n, for instance - and quantify the difficulty of determining which player will win given some initial board state.
The different possible answers sort games into the same "Complexity classes" that crop up throughout theoretical computer science.
Reference
Brubaker, B. (2023, January 25). The computer scientist who finds Life Lessons in Board Games. Quanta Magazine. Retrieved February 9, 2023, from https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-computer-scientist-who-finds-life-lessons-in-board-games-20230125/