Abstrakt
In 2019, Jim Henle published an article where he introduced a quadruple of intricate games from Sid Sackson's book 'A Gamut Of Games', posing interesting mathematical problems. After describing a winning strategy for the neat game 'Hold That Line', we have focused our attention to the perplexing 'Cutting Corners'.
While a winning strategy for the former game was found by guessing one 'lucky' move and subsequent case-by-case analysis, 'Cutting Corners' seems too complex to be analyzed without a computer. Our program written in Wolfram Mathematica revealed which of the two players has a winning strategy, as well as a few interesting facts as a bonus.
The goal of this article is to describe these results, as well as a few observations regarding the game's rules. Besides the original 6-move game by Sid Sackson, we also investigate its variants where the game ends after 4, 8 or 10 moves.