Griffin's Game

Game Poster
Original Griffin
Griffin's Final Form
Meat's Final Form
Original Meat

Inspiration

We were casually discussing computational game theory, as the average college student tends to do on a Friday evening, and came upon John Conway's "The Angel Problem". We then looked over to find our own angel of the group, Griffin, peacefully asleep, and a couple photos later, we had our game idea and a charismatic main character.

What it does

Griffin's Game is a simple, educational web game featuring Griffin (Our Angel) and his enemy, meat (The Devil). The game is an interactive version of John Conway's "The Angel Problem", described in Volume 29 of the MSRI's "Games of No Chance" as follows:

The Angel and the Devil play their game on an infinite chessboard, with one square for each ordered pair of integers (x, y). On his turn, the Devil may eat any square of the board whatsoever; this square is then no longer available to the Angel. The Angel is a “chess piece” that can move to any uneaten square (X, Y) that is at most 1000 king’s moves away from its present position (x, y)—in other words, for which |X − x| and |Y − y| are at most 1000. Angels have wings, so that it does not matter if any intervening squares have already been eaten.

The Devil wins if he can strand the Angel, that is, surround him by a moat of eaten squares of width at least 1000. The Angel wins just if he can continue to move forever.

What we have described is more precisely called an Angel of power 1000. The Angel Problem is this:

Determine whether an Angel of some power can defeat the Devil.

Conway originally proposed this problem in 1982, and offered cash rewards for those who could either prove that an angel of n power has a winning strategy, or that the devil can win regardless of the angel's power.

Our game puts you in control of an Angel of power 1, and the player can attempt to find the best strategy to avoid the meat. However, Griffin can never truly escape The Meat...