A golden ratio in a table that never mentions it
Grundy values for Wythoff's game, computed by the mex rule alone — a queen moving left, down or diagonally toward the corner, and whoever cannot move loses. The circles are Wythoff's 1907 description of the losing positions, which came thirty years before any of this machinery: the pairs formed from the golden ratio. They land on the zeros exactly. Nothing in the computation knows about φ and nothing in Wythoff's argument knows about Grundy values.
2 essays call
wythoff-two-routes. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every
call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever
member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues
about.
The positions it draws
5 distinct positions, harvested by running this generator again at the options each essay passed it.
| Position | Worth | Outcome | Drawn in |
|---|---|---|---|
queen at (1, 2) |
0 |
P | A golden ratio thirty years early · Three complete solutions in nine years |
queen at (3, 5) |
0 |
P | A golden ratio thirty years early · Three complete solutions in nine years |
queen at (4, 7) |
0 |
P | A golden ratio thirty years early · Three complete solutions in nine years |
queen at (6, 10) |
0 |
P | A golden ratio thirty years early · Three complete solutions in nine years · Wythoff's game, and the ratio nobody put there |
queen at (8, 13) |
0 |
P | A golden ratio thirty years early · Three complete solutions in nine years |
Where it is called
Changing this generator changes every one of these figures.
A golden ratio thirty years early
Wythoff described the losing positions of his game in 1907 with an argument about partitions of the integers, and no Grundy value anywhere in it. The theory that arrived thirty years later computes the same positions — and has never produced a closed form for the values, which the older argument had for the zeros from the start.
Three complete solutions in nine years
Bouton in 1901, Wythoff in 1907, Moore in 1910 — three airtight solutions of three games, all published before there was any theory of games at all. Asked about each other's games they all fail, and two of them fail by being wrong while one fails by having no form for the question. Only the last kind of failure decides anything.
The whole library · The position index · The figures that play back