Nim

Nim is a mathematical game of strategy in which two players take turns removing objects from distinct heaps. On each turn, a player must remove at least one object, and may remove any number of objects provided they all come from the same heap. The goal of the game is to be the player to remove the last object.

Variants of Nim have been played since ancient times. The game is said to have originated in China—it closely resembles the Chinese game of "Tsyan-shizi", or "picking stones"—but the origin is uncertain; the earliest European references to Nim are from the beginning of the 16th century. Its current name was coined by Charles L. Bouton of Harvard University, who also developed the complete theory of the game in 1901, but the origins of the name were never fully explained. The name is probably derived from German nimm meaning "take [imperative]", or the obsolete English verb nim of the same meaning.

Nim can be played as a misère game, in which the player to take the last object loses. Nim can also be played as a normal play game, which means that the person who makes the last move (i.e., who takes the last object) wins. This is called normal play because most games follow this convention, even though Nim usually does not.

Nim (programming language)

Nim (formerly named Nimrod) is an imperative, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language designed and developed by Andreas Rumpf. It is designed to be "efficient, expressive, and elegant", supporting metaprogramming, functional, message passing,procedural, and object-oriented programming styles by providing several features such as compile time code generation, algebraic data types, an elegant foreign function interface (FFI) with C and compiling to JavaScript.

Initially, the Nim compiler was written in Pascal. In 2008, a version of the compiler written in Nim was released. The compiler is open source and is being developed by a group of volunteers in addition to Andreas Rumpf. The compiler generates optimized C code and defers compiling to an external compiler (a large range of compilers including clang and GCC are supported) to leverage their optimization and portability abilities. The compiler can also generate C++ and Objective-C code to allow for easy interfacing with APIs written in those languages, this in turn allows Nim to be used to write iOS as well as Android applications.

Nim (disambiguation)

Nim is a mathematical two player game.

Nim or NIM may also refer to:

Technology and engineering

Other uses

See also