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

Let's Play Roulette - Just for Fun June 14, 2012 The other day it occurred to me I could double my money at Roulette if only I was willing to play a large enough numbers of times, even with possible losses building up before the ultimate win.   So, I decided to try this by simulation. Here’s the game.   You have a table with 36 number slots, half red and half black with two additional green slots, zero and double zero.   This gives a total of 38 possible outcomes for American roulette.   The table is circular, something like a bowl. A steel marble is sent a spinning in one direction and the table is sent spinning in the opposite direction.   When everything slows down, the marble settles into one of the slots.   That number pertaining to this slot is the winner.    You can bet on any number, or perhaps bet a red or black number will come up. In our game we will always play red. The payoff for any number is 36:1, and the payoff for red is your bet, 1:1.     We always bet