---
title: "Philip Henderson"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Philip Henderson"
aliases: ["Philip Thomas Henderson"]
first_seen: "2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Hex (game)","John Nash","PSPACE-completeness","Ryan Hayward","computer Hex solvers"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Computer scientist whose 2010 PhD dissertation at the University of
Alberta, *Playing and Solving the Game of Hex* (supervised by
[[entity-ryan-hayward|Ryan Hayward]]), is this vault's Tier 2 scholarly
secondary for two distinct facts: that [[entity-john-nash|Nash]]'s Hex
proof was a non-constructive existence argument (the "strategy-stealing
argument"), and that determining the winner of a Hex position is
PSPACE-complete, per [[entity-stefan-reisch|Stefan Reisch]] and Even &
Tarjan. Henderson also built some of the strongest computer Hex players of
his era (Wolve, MoHex), placing him among the small set of people who have
both formally analyzed the game and engineered machines to play it.

## References
- [[claim-nash-1952-rand-report-confirms-hex-proof-non-constructive]] · [[claim-hex-winner-determination-is-pspace-complete]]
- Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-21-verify-nashs-hex-strategy-stealing-proof-non-constructive.md