Queen reflections

Abstract

Wythoff Nim is a classical combinatorial game of queen moves on a chessboard. There are many ways to describe its P-positions (safe positions to move to). One way is to code them by the Fibonacci word 010010100100101.., which is the unique fixed point of the substitution of 0 by 01, and of 1 by 0. The coordinates of the n-th P-position are encoded by the location of the n-th zero and the n-th one in the Fibonacci word. We show that a minor modification of the rules of Wythoff Nim leads to a game with P-positions that are coded by 010010010010100100.. This word can be derived by deleting all 2’s from the Tribonacci word, which is the unique fixed point of the substitution of 0 by 01, of 1 by 02, and of 2 by 0.