The Determinant Game
By Rod Carvalho
Via Alex Gittens’ blog, here’s a cool game:
Let’s play a two-person game. Start with a 
zero matrix, and at their turn each player changes one of the zero entries to a number in the set 
. The first player’s goal is to make the determinant positive, while the second’s is to make it negative. Numbers may be used only once.
What is each player’s “optimal” strategy? If both players play “optimal” strategies, who will win?
Tags: Brain Teasers, Recreational Mathematics
This entry was posted on January 3, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under Brain Teasers, Games, Recreational Math. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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January 10, 2008 at 1:17 am |
any idea?
January 10, 2008 at 1:42 am |
I tried some ideas, but I haven’t yet had much time to think about it. The mathematics of it is not too straightforward, so I assume that there must be some heuristics-based intuitive solution.
April 7, 2009 at 7:54 am |
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