The History of Hex
A rare case of the same simple, elegant game being invented twice, independently, by two people who'd go on to become well known for entirely different reasons.
Invented Twice
Hex was first invented in 1942 by Danish mathematician, poet, and designer Piet Hein, who introduced it in Denmark under the name "Polygon" after puzzling over whether a four-color-map-style game could ever end in a draw.
It was independently reinvented in 1948 by the mathematician John Nash - later a Nobel laureate in economics and the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind - while he was a graduate student at Princeton, where students played it on hexagonal bathroom floor tiles and called it "Nash".
The game reached a wider audience in 1957 when Martin Gardner wrote about it in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, giving it the name "Hex" that stuck ever since.
A Favorite of Mathematicians
Hex is a favorite subject in game theory and topology because of a clean, provable fact: the game can never end in a draw - a consequence of the same mathematics behind the Brouwer fixed-point theorem - which also means a strategy-stealing argument proves the first player must have a winning strategy, even though nobody knows what that strategy actually is for larger boards.
Solving Hex completely gets dramatically harder as the board grows: small boards (up to about 10x10) have been fully solved by computer search, but the standard 11x11 tournament size and larger remain unsolved, making Hex a continuing target for both game-AI research and combinatorial game theory.
This Version
PaperGames plays on a 9x9 board, a size that keeps games comfortably shorter while still giving both the connecting and the blocking strategies real room to matter.