So Long Sucker is a strategy board game requiring 4 players, each with c chips of their designated color, and a board made of k empty piles. With a clear set-up come intricate rules, such as: players taking turns but not in a fixed order, agreements between some players being made and broken at any time, and a player winning the game even without any chips in hand. One of the main points of interest in studying this game, is finding when a player has a winning strategy. The game begins with four players that get eliminated successively until the winner is left. To study winning strategies, it is of interest to look at endgame situations. We present the following game set-up: there are two players left in the game, Blue and Red, and only their respective chip colors. In this thesis, we characterize Blue's winning situations and strategies through inductive reasoning.

Samuel Beckett’s skepticism regarding language’s ability to communicate effectively drives his dramas’ use of formal and stylistic gestures that emphasize the musical potential of words. In this report, I analyze Beckett’s play Endgame (1958) in light of its musical elements and their implications for performance. Critics have debated the putative presence of sonata form, a type of musical structure prevalent among classical pieces from the eighteenth century, in Endgame. Emmanuel Jacquart proposes that the play follows such a form, while Thomas Mansell and Catherine Laws doubt the possibility of such interdisciplinarity. Mansell wonders whether the ascription of sonata form to Endgame’s structure merely couches dramatic fundamentals in musical terms, while Laws argues that the lack of harmonic structure in human speech prevents a spoken medium like drama from fully absorbing the formal conventions of classical music. I explore the uncharted territory between these two critical camps, linking the implications of Jacquart’s position for the performance of Endgame, as well as Mansell’s and Laws’s reiterations of the fundamental separation of language and music, to Beckett’s own preoccupation with the inability of language to express thought and emotion adequately. Ultimately, I contend that Endgame functions not simply as a sonata, but as a frustrated sonata; that is, it approximates sonata form but can never fully replicate it. As such, Endgame becomes a point of origin for Beckett’s more experimental later plays, a concept I illustrate by demonstrating how Play (1963), the work commonly regarded as the turning point between Beckett’s early and late dramatic styles, essentially revisits and refines the frustrated sonata. / text

<p>This study constitutes an attempt to bring the notion of stupidity into relation with ethics and creativity, through a reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Employing Emmanuel Lévinas' theories on ethics - the responsible responsiveness in regard to the Other and the concept of the Face - the objective is to demonstrate how stupidity, conceived as lack of control and knowledge, functions as a precondition for the ethical relation between humans, as well as that of the individual to her creativity.</p>

This study constitutes an attempt to bring the notion of stupidity into relation with ethics and creativity, through a reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Employing Emmanuel Lévinas' theories on ethics - the responsible responsiveness in regard to the Other and the concept of the Face - the objective is to demonstrate how stupidity, conceived as lack of control and knowledge, functions as a precondition for the ethical relation between humans, as well as that of the individual to her creativity.

This thesis is concerned with the validation of chess endgame strategies. It is also concerned with the synthesis of strategies that can be validated. A strategy for a given player is the specification of the move to be made by that player from any position that may occur. This move may be dependent on the previous moves of both sides. A strategy is said to be correct if following the strategy always leads to an outcome of at least the same game theoretic value as the starting position. We are not concerned with proving the correctness of programs that implement the strategies under consideration. We shall be working with knowledge-based programs which produce playing strategies, and assume that their concrete implementations (in POP2, PROLOG etc.) are correct. The synthesis approach taken attempts to use the large body of heuristic knowledge and theory, accumulated over the centuries by chessmasters, to find playing strategies. Our concern here is to produce structures for representing a chessmaster's knowledge wnich can be analysed within a game theoretic model. The validation approach taken is that a theory of the domain in the form of the game theoretic model of chess provides an objective measure of the strategy followed by a program. Our concern here is to analyse the structures created in the synthesis phase. This is an instance of a general problem, that of quantifying the performance of computing systems. In general to quantify the performance of a system we need,- A theory of the domain. - A specification of the problem to be solved. - Algorithms and/or domain-specific knowledge to be applied to solve the problem.

Martin Scorsese expressed dissatisfaction stating that superhero movies lacks uniqueness and emotional and psychological depth. In his opinion, these movies depict spectacle rather than character. Scorsese is not alone in his view - this has been a general opinion among film critics for decades. Justin Wyatt examines the recipe for commercial success in his book High concept: Movies and marketing in Hollywood from 1994. Film theorist Kristin Thompson however, denounces the idea that High Concept or post-classicism changes structures in narrative. This thesis examines visual style and intertextuality in three films released in 2019: Avengers: Endgame, Hellboy and Joker. Are there similarities and/or differences in relation to Wyatt’s theories? All three movies use style and intertextuality to tell their stories and they all have excess scenes to please the audience visually. However, they still use classic Hollywood narrative with three acts and cause-and-effect storylines.

The non-hydrostatic dynamical core ENDGame (Even Newer Dynamics for the General Atmospheric Modelling of the Environment) is extended into the thermosphere to test its feasability as a whole-atmosphere dynamical core that can simulate the large scale fluid dynamics of the whole atmosphere from the surface to the top of the thermosphere at 600km. This research may have applications in the development of a Sun-to-Earth modelling system involving the Met Office Unified Model, which will be useful for space weather forecasting and chemical climate modelling. Initial attempts to raise the top boundary of ENDGame above ∼100km give rise to instabilities. To explore the potential causes of these instabilities, a one dimensional column version of ENDGame: ENDGame1D, is developed to study the effects of vertically propagating acoustic waves in the dynamical core. A 2D ray-tracing scheme is also developed, which accounts for the numerical effects on wave propagation. It is found that ENDGame’s numerics have a tendency towards the excessive focussing of wave energy towards vertical propagation, and have poor handling of large amplitude waves, also being unable to handle shocks. A key finding is that the physical processes of vertical molecular viscosity and diffusion prevent the excessive growth of wave amplitudes in the thermosphere in ENDGame, which may be crucial to improving ENDGame’s stability as it is extended upwards. Therefore, a fully implicit-in-time implementation of vertical molecular viscosity and diffusion is developed in both ENDGame1D and the full three-dimensional version of ENDGame: ENDGame3D. A new scheme is developed to deal with the viscous and diffusive terms with the dynamics terms in a fully coupled way to avoid time-splitting errors that may arise. The combination of a small amount of off-centring of ENDGame’s semi-implicit formulation and the inclusion of vertical molecular viscosity and diffusion act to make ENDGame significantly more stable, as long as the simulation is able to remain stable up to the molecularly diffused region above an altitude of ∼130km.

<p>This paper presents an approach in contemporary, abstract art for a new way of experiencing modernist abstraction. This has not been possible until now, about 40 years after the postmodern turn against modernism in art, and the closely connected formalism. This new approach is represented in this paper by the Swedish contemporary artists Ann Edholm and Jacob Dahlgren. Modernist artists such as Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian receives a new relevance to contemporary abstract art. This opens up for a new, more complex and more dialectical understanding and re-evaluation of modernism and its abstract art.This is shown by a historical and chronological investigation which highlights modernist abstract art, formalism, and the critical and post-modern Neo-geometric ‘abstraction’ of the eighties. This background has been a way of proving how modernist abstraction still can possess a validity for contemporary art today, and even vitalize a continuation for abstract art as a contemporary practice.</p>

This paper presents an approach in contemporary, abstract art for a new way of experiencing modernist abstraction. This has not been possible until now, about 40 years after the postmodern turn against modernism in art, and the closely connected formalism. This new approach is represented in this paper by the Swedish contemporary artists Ann Edholm and Jacob Dahlgren. Modernist artists such as Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian receives a new relevance to contemporary abstract art. This opens up for a new, more complex and more dialectical understanding and re-evaluation of modernism and its abstract art.This is shown by a historical and chronological investigation which highlights modernist abstract art, formalism, and the critical and post-modern Neo-geometric ‘abstraction’ of the eighties. This background has been a way of proving how modernist abstraction still can possess a validity for contemporary art today, and even vitalize a continuation for abstract art as a contemporary practice.

Title: Solving Endgames in Large Imperfect-Information Games such as Poker Author: Bc. Karel Ha Department: Department of Applied Mathematics Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Milan Hladík, Ph.D., Department of Applied Mathematics Abstract: Endgames have a distinctive role for players. At the late stage of games, many aspects are finally clearly defined, deeming exhaustive analysis tractable. Specialised endgame handling is rewarding for games with perfect information (e.g., Chess databases pre-computed for entire classes of endings, or dividing Go board into separate independent subgames). An appealing idea would be to extend this approach to imperfect-information games such as the famous Poker: play the early parts of the game, and once the subgame becomes feasible, calculate an ending solution. However, the problem is much more complex for imperfect information. Subgames need to be generalized to account for information sets. Unfortunately, such a generalization cannot be solved straightaway, as it does not generally preserve optimality. As a consequence, we may end up with a far more exploitable strategy. There are currently three techniques to deal with this challenge: (a) disregard the problem entirely; (b) use a decomposition technique, which sadly retains only the same quality; (c) or formalize improvements of...