Limited-information strategies in Banach-Mazur games
The Banach-Mazur game is an infinite-length game played on a topological space X, in which two players take turns choosing members of an infinite decreasing sequence of open sets, the first player trying to ensure that the intersection of this sequence is empty, and the second that it is not. A limited-information strategy for one of the players is a game plan that, on any given move, depends on only a small part of the game's history. In this talk we will discuss Telgársky's conjecture, which asserts roughly that there must be topological spaces where winning strategies for the Banach-Mazur game cannot be too limited, but must rely on large parts of the game's history in a significant way. Recently, it was shown that this conjecture fails in models of set theory satisfying GCH + $\Box$. In such models it is always possible for one player to code all information concerning a game's history into a small piece of it. We will discuss these so-called coding strategies, why assuming GCH + $\Box$ makes them work so well, and what can go wrong in other models of set theory.