Sprague-Grundy theory (on the equivalence of certain games)
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
Imagine you had two games which had the same underlying graph of positions, but two very different representations (so say a subset of a game like Chess and a subset of a game like Hex). You'd know that the two games are equivalent and there's a one-to-one mapping, they should have exactly the same difficulty, but some humans would find one easier than the other.
This would give us a great insight into how people think, and help us understand the relationship between the representation of a problem and it's underlying complexity.
"A game is played with three piles of stones and two players. At her turn, a player removes one or more stones from the piles. However, if she takes stones from more than one pile, she must remove the same number of stones from each of the selected piles."
(Please do not post complete solutions, as this is against the spirit of Project Euler.)