Section 8.3, paragraph 2NIM is a diagnostic starting point for harder self-play benchmarks
Informal interpretation Motivation, interpretation or scope; not a formal claim.
1 Paper text
NIM is therefore a diagnostic starting point: its efficient optimal strategy lets us separate a representational obstruction from the difficulty of discovering a strategy. The longer-term benchmark is self-play on impartial games whose strategic structure is only partly understood or whose exact analysis becomes impractical as positions grow. Three candidates illustrate different challenges:
Generated from paper_jmlr.tex, lines 1239–1239.
2 Explain this
NIM is useful precisely because we know an efficient optimal strategy. It lets us ask whether an architecture can express that strategy and whether training finds it. Harder impartial games add another challenge: discovering strategic structure that is only partly understood or expensive to obtain by exact search.
3 How this is formalised
A scope statement; nothing is formalised.
| Paper anchor | sec:othergames-p2 (website anchor; the manuscript has no label here) |
|---|---|
| Displayed as | Section 8.3, paragraph 2 |
| Claim | NIM is a diagnostic starting point for harder self-play benchmarks |
| Coverage category | Informal interpretation |
| Statement source | paper_jmlr.tex lines 1239–1239; SHA-256 of the normalised block source 27041a576294ab72… |
| Explanations | explain/c-othergames-scope, formal/c-othergames-scope |
| Build evidence | fresh isolated rebuild, audit report |
4 Lean statement and source
No Lean statement corresponds to this claim. This is interpretation or motivation, not a formal mathematical claim.
Build evidence: fresh isolated rebuild of all 38 bundled modules with Lean (version 4.26.0, started 2026-10-10T15:21:56Z, finished 2026-10-10T15:27:00Z: 38/38 modules compiled, 1588 axiom reports, no errors. See Build for the commands and the independent audit of 2026-10-10 (dated evidence).