HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math

Name: HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math
Uploaded: 2021-08-22T12:00:01Z
Duration: 57 min 3 s
Channel: Owen Maitzen
Description: Owen Maitzen's animated hour-long introduction to Hackenbush, a simple combinatorial game, and how its strategy leads to surreal numbers and the roots of the number system.

Owen Maitzen3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022-2025

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562K views · 5 years ago · explainer · evergreen

Owen Maitzen's animated hour-long introduction to Hackenbush, a simple combinatorial game, and how its strategy leads to surreal numbers and the roots of the number system.

HN recommends it as an accessible, well-visualized entry point to Hackenbush, surreal numbers and their link to Nim.

Recreational & visual math Probability & game theory Pure mathematics #hackenbush #surrealnumbers #nim #gametheory #mathvisualization

3 comments from Hacker News

@lblume2025 · in “Transfinite NIM (the game, not the programming language)”

Nim is, in fact, a proper subset of Hackenbush, a game extensively studied by Conway. I found the following video extremely useful and well-visualized: ▶ this video

Strongly recommendsView on HN

@nthingtohide2024 · in “Numbers Are Leaves”

HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math ▶ this video Thanks for the blogpost, I think you will like this above SOME3 entry. Owen Maitzen committed suicide which is mentioned in the following video. The Endless Universe of "Bean and Nothingness" link

HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math

3 comments from Hacker News

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HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math

3 comments from Hacker News

The Unbeatable Game from the 60s: Dr NIM

P vs. NP and the Computational Complexity Zoo

The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything

Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth—"A Conjecture That Had To Be True" (2017)

A simple trick to design your own solutions for Rubik's cubes

Math Encounters -- Five Balls, Two Hands: The Patterns of Juggling -- Colin Wright (Presentation)

Visualizing the 4d numbers Quaternions

Pi and the Mandelbrot Set - Numberphile

Fantastic Quaternions - Numberphile

A Swift Introduction to Geometric Algebra

Math Magic

Imaginary Numbers Are Real [Part 1: Introduction]

The Uncracked Problem with 33 - Numberphile

Hamming, "n-Dimensional Space" (April 14, 1995)

The Banach–Tarski Paradox

1. A strange determinant

Math's Fundamental Flaw

Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co.

Essence of linear algebra preview

Thinking outside the 10-dimensional box