• Journal for History of Mathematics
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.53-74
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• 2009

Black-out Game(Lightout, Merlin Game, ${\sigma}$+Game) is an interesting game on the chessboard, when you click a button with black or white color, it changes color of itself and other buttons who shares edges. With this rule, we win the game when we have a chessboard with all same color after we click some of the buttons of it. Pretty much of research has been made on founding the winnable strategy for this type of game. In this paper, we first introduce a history of mathematical modeling on this game. Then we develop an algorithm to offer a winnable blackout game of any size. Our tools also show our new algorithm works. Finally, we show how we can use this game in mathematics education.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.597-612
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• 2007

For finding the optimal strategy in Blackout game which was introduced in the homepage of popular movie "Beautiful mind", we have developed and generalized a mathematical proof and an algorithm with a couple of softwares. It did require only the concept of basis and knowledge of basic linear algebra. Mathematical modeling and analysis were given for the square matrix case in(Lee,2004) and we now generalize it to a generalized $m{\times}n$ Blackout game. New proof and algorithm will be given with a visualization.