HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math

Owen Maitzen · 562.4K views · 2021-08-22 · 57:03

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2022–2025

Topics

Recreational & visual math Probability & game theory Pure mathematics

What people said

lblume · 2025-02 · Strong recommendation
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: [VIDEO]
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nthingtohide · 2024-12 · Recommendation
HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math [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]
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rini17 · 2022-09 · Recommendation
All numbers are fictitious :) Though, I think "games" built on surreal numbers are akin to these. [LINK] An accessible intro: [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Owen Maitzen, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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