Some Useful Maths

A talk from EMF 2022 by Alexander Bolton

On Saturday June 4, 2022 at in Stage B

4 lightning talks about different mathematical subjects

1. *A tip for when to take risks in board games and in life*. I will give an insight into how Google's AlphaGo AI chooses its next move, and give an example of a game that seems biased against you, but you actually have a slight advantage.

2. *Teaching a robot to tell jokes*. I will introduce the concept of factor graphs and describe an application of them to joke generation.

3. *The twitter bot that is playing the longest possible game of chess*. The World Chess Federation has some rules to prevent games from going on forever. I will outline a proposal by Tom Murphy VII for the longest possible legal chess game, and show the Twitter bot that I made to celebrate this achievement.

4. *A little theory of abundant numbers*. Abundant numbers, e.g. 12, 60, 360, are useful as they have many factors. I will show you how common these numbers are and how to find them.

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