Solitaire Mancala Games and the Chinese Remainder Theorem

DOI10.4169/AMER.MATH.MONTHLY.120.08.706MaRDI QIDQ5404028zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Laura Taalman, Anthony Tongen, Brant C. Jones

Publication date 20 March 2014

Published in The American Mathematical Monthly (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3593

zbMATH Keywords

Tchoukaillon boards

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

2-person games (91A05) Games on graphs (graph-theoretic aspects) (05C57) Recreational mathematics (00A08) Calculation of integer sequences (11Y55)

Abstract: Mancala is a generic name for a family of sowing games that are popular all over the world. There are many two-player mancala games in which a player may move again if their move ends in their own store. In this work, we study a simple solitaire mancala game called Tchoukaillon that facilitates the analysis of "sweep" moves, in which all of the stones on a portion of the board can be collected into the store. We include a self-contained account of prior research on Tchoukaillon, as well as a new description of all winning Tchoukaillon boards with a given length. We also prove an analogue of the Chinese Remainder Theorem for Tchoukaillon boards, and give an algorithm to reconstruct a complete winning Tchoukaillon board from partial information. Finally, we propose a graph-theoretic generalization of Tchoukaillon for further study.

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