Beggar My Neighbour - encyclopedia article about Beggar My Neighbour.

This article is about the card game. For the British sitcom, see Beggar My Neighbour (TV series).

Beggar-My-Neighbour, also known as Beat Jack Out of Doors, Beat Your Neighbour Out of Doors, Strip Jack Naked and Draw the Well Dry, is a simple card game somewhat similar in nature to War, and has spawned a more complicated variant, Egyptian Ratscrew. It was likely invented in Britain and has been known there since at least the 1860s. It appears in Charles Dickens's 1861 novel Great Expectations,^[1] as the only card game Pip, the book's protagonist, as a child seems to know how to play. A standard 52-card deck is divided equally between two players, and the two stacks of cards are placed on the table with the backs facing upwards. The first player lays down his top card face up, and the opponent plays his top card on it, and this goes on alternately as long as no ace or face card king, queen, or jack appears.

If either player turns up such a card, his opponent has to pay a penalty: four cards for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen, or one for a jack. When he has done so, the player of the penalty card wins the hand, takes all the cards in the pile and places them under his pack. The game continues in the same fashion, the winner having the advantage of placing the first card. However, if the second player turns up another ace or face card in the course of paying to the original penalty card, his payment ceases and the first player must pay to this new card. This changing of penalization can continue indefinitely. The hand is lost by the player who, in playing his penalty, turns up neither an ace nor a face card. Then, his opponent acquires all of the cards in the pile.

Unsolved problems in mathematics: Is there a non-terminating game of Beggar-My-Neighbour?

When a single player has all of the cards in the deck in his stack, he has won.

A longstanding question in combinatorial game theory asks whether there is a game of Beggar-My-Neighbour which goes on forever. This can happen only if the game is eventually periodic—that is, if it eventually reaches some state it has been in before. Some smaller decks of cards have infinite games, while others do not. John Conway once listed this among his anti-Hilbert problems, open questions whose pursuit should emphatically not drive the future of mathematical research.

Note

1. ^ "I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me." Great Expectations Chapter 8

References

Marc Paulhus (1999). "Beggar My Neighbour". The American Mathematical Monthly 106 (2): 162–165. Available via JSTOR (subscription required).

Beggar My Neighbour was a black-and-white British sitcom starring Peter Jones, June Whitfield and Desmond Walter-Ellis. It aired from 1966 to 1968 and was written by Ken Hoare and Mike Sharland.
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War is a card game for two or more players. It uses a standard Western fifty-two-playing card deck. It is most often played as a children's game, because of its simplicity.

How to play

The cards are divided evenly, with each player's cards remaining face-down.
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Motto
"Dieu et mon droit" ^[2] (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
"God Save the Queen" ^[3]
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Centuries: 18th century - 19th century - 20th century

1830s 1840s 1850s - 1860s - 1870s 1880s 1890s
1860 1861 1862 1863 1864
1865 1866 1867 1868 1869

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Events and trends

Technology

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Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is acclaimed as one of history's greatest novelists
Born: 7 January 1812
Portsmouth, England

Died: 9 May 1870 (aged 58)
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Great Expectations

Author Charles Dickens
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) novel
Publisher Chapman and Hall
Publication date 1860 – 1861 (in serial form) & 1861 (in 3 volumes)
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playing card is a typically hand-sized piece of heavy paper or thin plastic. A complete set of cards is a pack or deck. A deck of cards is used for playing one of many card games, some of which constitute gambling.
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ace" comes from the Old French word 'as' (from Latin 'as') meaning 'a unit', from the name of a small Roman coin. It originally meant the side of a die with only one mark, before it was a term for a playing card.
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The king is a playing card with a picture of a king on it. The usual rank of a king is as if it were a 13, that is, above the queen. In some games, the king ranks high; in others, it ranks below the ace; in yet others, such as Pinochle, it ranks below the 10.
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The queen is a playing card with a picture of a queen on it. The usual rank of a queen is as if it were 12 (that is, between the king and the jack).

In the standard English playing card deck, the Queen and the other face cards represent no one in particular, although
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The jack or knave is a playing card with a picture of a young man on it. The usual rank of a jack is as if it were an 11 (that is, below the queen and above the 10) although in some games - such as Blackjack - it is equal to a 10.
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This article lists some unsolved problems in mathematics. See individual articles for details and sources.

Millennium Prize Problems

Of the seven Millennium Prize Problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute, the six ones yet to be solved are:

P versus NP

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Combinatorial game theory (CGT) is a mathematical theory that only studies two-player games which have a position which the players take turns changing in defined ways or moves to achieve a defined winning condition.
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In computer science and automata theory, a state is a unique configuration of information in a program or machine. It is a concept that occasionally extends into some forms of systems programming such as lexers and parsers.
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John Horton Conway

Born November 26 1937
Liverpool, England
Residence U.S.
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Hilbert's problems are a list of twenty-three problems in mathematics put forth by German mathematician David Hilbert at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900.
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