First Blog

Wars are all over the place.  Please forget about Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan for a couple of minutes.  These are serious and tragic wars with many lives lost.   But kids play wars, too, like in the card game . Let's do this.     Almost every kid plays war of some kind. Aside from the usual cowboy and other war games, rainy afternoons were often the time to get out a deck of cards and play the card game War. As many times as I played this game as a kid, I can hardly ever remember finishing a game. What I can remember mostly is making a "tactical" agreement to quit and do something else.     The other day, I thought to play war again --- but on a computer. For a game of pure chance, there is a remarkable amount of mathematics involved. If your mathematical toolkit includes course in probability, then you can appreciate just how complex this simple kids game is. Just determining the expected outcome after playing the first round after dealing is complex enough, let a