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Reconstruction Method
This page is a bibliographic and methodological reconstruction, not a full-text reproduction. The case corpus uses public bibliographic records and book/chapter-level source spines. Strategy tags overlap: a single case may use several methods, so histogram percentages indicate case prevalence rather than a probability distribution.
The reconstruction treats Conway’s work as a repeatable workflow: invent a playable universe; compress it into notation; compute examples; discover an invariant; then promote the invariant into a theorem, table, algorithm, or research program. The corpus combines the Princeton bibliography’s article-paper list with chapter-level reconstructions from Conway’s books and lecture-style expositions.
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Decision Tree of Strategies
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Prevalence Ranking
Bars show the percentage of the 300 cases using each strategy. Since each case may carry multiple strategy tags, the total prevalence can exceed 100%.
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300-Case Corpus
| # | Year | Source | Case | Main thesis / problem move | Result type | Strategy tags |
|---|
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Source Spine
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