15 Facts About Nim

Nim is a mathematical game of strategy in which two players take turns removing objects from distinct heaps or piles.

Nim is typically played as a misere game, in which the player to take the last object loses.

Nim can be played as a normal play game whereby the player taking the last object wins.

Normal play Nim is fundamental to the Sprague–Grundy theorem, which essentially says that in normal play every impartial game is equivalent to a Nim heap that yields the same outcome when played in parallel with other normal play impartial games .

Nim is a special case of a poset game where the poset consists of disjoint chains .

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Ferranti built a Nim playing computer which was displayed at the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Game of Nim was the subject of Martin Gardner's February 1958 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

Practical strategy to win at the game of Nim is for a player to get the other into one of the following positions, and every successive turn afterwards they should be able to make one of the smaller positions.

Nim has been mathematically solved for any number of initial heaps and objects, and there is an easily calculated way to determine which player will win and which winning moves are open to that player.

When played as a misere game, Nim strategy is different only when the normal play move would leave only heaps of size one.

Greedy Nim is a variation wherein the players are restricted to choosing stones from only the largest pile.

Greedy Nim Misere has the same rules as Greedy Nim, but here the last player able to make a move loses.

Once all the stones are placed, a game of Nim begins, starting with the next player that would move.

N-d Nim is played on a board, whereon any number of continuous pieces can be removed from any hyper-row.

Candy Nim is a version of normal play Nim in which players try to achieve two goals at the same time: taking the last object and taking the maximum number of candies by the end of the game.