Blockbusting is a two-player game in which players alternate choosing squares from a line of squares, with one player aiming to choose as many pairs of adjacent squares as possible and the other player aiming to thwart this goal.
Elwyn Berlekamp
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp (September 6, 1940 – April 9, 2019) was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.combinatorial game theory
Combinatorial game theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that typically studies sequential games with perfect information. Research in this field has primarily focused on two-player games in which a ''position'' ev ...
.
Rules
Blockbusting is a
partisan game In combinatorial game theory, a game is partisan (sometimes partizan) if it is not impartial. That is, some moves are available to one player and not to the other, or the payoffs are not symmetric.
Most games are partisan. For example, in chess, on ...
for two players, meaning that the roles of the two players are not symmetric. These two players are often known as Red and Blue (or Right and Left); they play the game on an strip of squares called "parcels". Each player, in turn, claims and colors one previously unclaimed parcel until all parcels have been claimed.
At the end, Left's score is the number of pairs of neighboring parcels both of which he has claimed. Left therefore tries to maximize that number while Right tries to minimize it. Adjacent Right-Right pairs do not affect the score.
Although the purpose of the game is to further the study of
combinatorial game theory
Combinatorial game theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that typically studies sequential games with perfect information. Research in this field has primarily focused on two-player games in which a ''position'' ev ...
, Berlekamp provides an interpretation alluding to the practice of
blockbusting
Blockbusting was a business practice in the United States in which real estate agents and building developers convinced residents in a particular area to sell their property at below-market prices. This was achieved by fearmongering the homeowne ...
by
real estate agent
Real estate agents and real estate brokers are people who represent sellers or buyers of real estate or real property. While a broker may work independently, an agent usually works under a licensed broker to represent clients. Brokers and age ...
s: the players may be seen as rival agents buying up all the parcels on a street, where Left is a
segregationist
Racial segregation is the separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by peopl ...
trying to place clients as neighbors of one another
while Right is an integrationist trying to break up these segregated groups.
Theory
In introducing the game of Blockbusting in 1987,
Elwyn Berlekamp
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp (September 6, 1940 – April 9, 2019) was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.overheating, an operation for analyzing the theory of combinatorial games, and used Blockbusting as an example for that operation.
The operation of overheating was later adapted by Berlekamp and David Wolfe
to warming to analyze the end-game of Go.
The analysis of Blockbusting may be used as the basis of a strategy for the combinatorial game of Domineering.