I’m reading Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, the biography of the schizophrenic Nobel Prize winner John Nash, and I’ve just reached a point where, as a graduate student at Princeton, he invents a little game to illustrate game theory. This game, which captivates the math department, is called Nash in honor of the creator. It later was sold commercially under the name Hex. Hex is very similar to a game called Twixt that I remember playing as a kid. The idea is to build a chain from one side of the board to the other while simultaneously preventing your opponent from doing the same.
I went searching for it on the web and found several places where you can play it in the privacy and comfort of your own browser. Here’s a good one: MazeWorks – Hex
Incidentally, John Nash is still alive despite the fact that his best-selling biography was written years ago. Here is his home page at Princeton. He doesn’t appear to be much of an HTML hack, but you can find presentations he’s given in the last few months if you poke around. And Princeton is good enough to keep his 32 page Nobelworthy thesis available for ready download. Here it is. It’s a big PDF scan of the original, complete with typos and handwritten Greek letters. We don’t need no stinking TeX.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 
Good Lord….I have no reason being up this late, let alone playing this insane game. A game, which , for the life of me I cannot win.
But thank you…I will stay awake until I can win once..just once…please.
I woke up this morning wanting to email or call doctor Nash and ask him could ‘Nash’ [ or Hex] be played using colored M&M’s for marker stones as a multiplayer game?
i thought a while and decided to do a second search on just the game itself and found you. I might still call Nash, just to do it and ask him my question, but thanks for the links. I might build myself a gameboard out of some vintage floor tile on a table and see what multiplayer M&M’s does for the game.
THis game is fun. I only won once but who cares.