The History of Hex
A rare case of the same simple, elegant game being invented twice - according to the usual account 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 reinvented in the late 1940s, reportedly independently, 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. Fellow students called it "Nash" or "John", the latter supposedly because it could be played on the hexagonal tiles of bathroom floors.
In 1952 Parker Brothers brought the game out under the name "Hex", and that name stuck. It reached a much wider audience in 1957, when Martin Gardner wrote about it in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.
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: computer search has fully solved every board up to 9x9 and only some openings on 10x10, 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.