We have a date for #Sprouts2026: Saturday, April 11, 2026. Woo!
Sprouts is a #CombinatorialGames conference where undergrads give the contributed talks. Everyone can attend. Registration is free and we have great talks as well as human and computer tournaments.
This year we're playing #BattleSheep. Come join us at Sprouts! https://kyleburke.info/sprouts/sprouts2026/
On Monday, November 17, at 3:30pm ET, I get to give the next VCGT talk on the computational complexity of the game #BattleSheep: https://sites.google.com/view/virtual-cgt/seminar
Abstract: Battle Sheep is a board game published by Blue Orange Games where players take turns moving stacks of sheep tokens around a hexagonal board, always leaving at least one sheep behind. In this talk we'll learn the basics of the game, play once, and finally show that determining the winnability of the game is PSPACE-complete. This talk assumes no prior knowledge of computational complexity.
The seminar started after the Virtual Combinatorial Games Workshop in June 2020. There will be a mix of research talks, tutorials, and coffee meetings. If you wish to attend, please contact Melissa Huggan (email address at the bottom) to be added to the email list for the video call link.
The #Sprouts2026 page is up: https://kyleburke.info/sprouts/sprouts2026/ We still don't know which day in April 2026 we'll hold it (probably a Saturday).
We're going to play #BattleSheep. We'll have a human tournament and computer player tournament. You can mess around with computer players here: https://kyleburke.info/sprouts/sprouts2026/sprouts2026ComputerTournament.php
Sprouts is a conference for undergraduates to present about abstract games, but everyone is welcome to attend.
See you in April! #CombinatorialGames