Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
A new series of papers has settled a long-standing question related to the popular game in which players seek patterned sets of three cards.
That changed on May 5, when three mathematicians — Ernie Croot of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Vsevolod Lev of the University of Haifa, Oranim, in Israel, and Péter Pál Pach of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary — posted a paper online showing how to use the polynomial method to solve a closely related problem, in which each Set attribute can have four different options instead of three. For technical reasons, this problem is more tractable than the original Set problem.
