Related papers: A Treatise on Sucker's Bets
The abc conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in number theory, claims that three positive integers satisfying a+b=c cannot simultaneously have significant repetition among their prime factors; in particular, the product of the…
The Hummer Principle was born from the mind of Bob Hummer in 1946, which consists of performing card shuffles with an even number of cards while leaving some properties of the deck intact. In this document, we will present a generalization…
The beautiful theory of statistical gambling, started by Dubins and Savage (for subfair games) and continued by Kelly and Breiman (for superfair games) has mostly been studied under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a continuous…
Given a (possibly infinite) subset $A$ of the natural numbers, we ask how many times a fair six-sided die must be rolled until the rolled numbers add up to an element of $A$. Using a one-dimensional dynamic programming recursion together…
We consider a special, geometric case of a balancing game introduced by Spencer in 1977. Consider any arrangement $\mathcal{L}$ of $n$ lines in the plane, and assume that each cell of the arrangement contains a box. Alice initially places…
In 1693, Isaac Newton answered a query from Samuel Pepys about a problem involving dice. Newton's analysis is discussed and attention is drawn to an error he made.
This article, based on a talk, treats some elementary, but not completely simple examples from probability. They concern multiple birthday coincidences, throwing dice, the combinatorics of the German card game "Doppelkopf", and the…
We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and…
In 2024, Daniel Litt posed a simple coinflip game pitting Alice's "Heads-Heads" vs Bob's "Heads-Tails": who is more likely to win if they score 1 point per occurrence of their substring in a sequence of n fair coinflips? This attracted over…
At the end, the house always wins! This simple truth holds for all public games of chance. Nevertheless, since lotteries have existed, people have tried everything to give luck a helping hand. This article compares objective scientific…
Noga Alon and Yaakov Malinovsky recently studied the following game: you start at 0, and keep rolling a fair standard die, and add the outcomes until the sum happens to be prime. We generalize this in several ways, illustrating the power of…
What are the face-probabilities of a cuboidal die, i.e. a die with different side-lengths? This paper introduces a model for these probabilities based on a Gibbs distribution. Experimental data produced in this work and drawn from the…
The dollar game is a chip-firing game introduced by Baker and Norine (2007) as a context in which to formulate and prove the Riemann-Roch theorem for graphs. A divisor on a graph is a formal integer sum of vertices. Each determines a dollar…
It was widely reported in the media that, on 23 May 2009, at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, Patricia DeMauro, playing craps for only the second time, rolled the dice for four hours and 18 minutes, finally sevening out at…
The toss of a coin is usually regarded as the epitome of randomness, and has been used for ages as a means to resolve disputes in a simple, fair way. Perhaps as ancient as consulting objects such as coins and dice is the art of maliciously…
Dice control involves "setting" the dice and then throwing them carefully, in the hope of influencing the outcomes and gaining an advantage at craps. How does one test for this ability? To specify the alternative hypothesis, we need a…
Inspired by the theory of desirable gambles that is used to model uncertainty in the field of imprecise probabilities, I present a theory of desirable things. Its aim is to model a subject's beliefs about which things are desirable. What…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
This is a survey article on prime number races. Chebyshev noticed in the first half of the nineteenth century that for any given value of x, there always seem to be more primes of the form 4n+3 less than x then there are of the form 4n+1.…
A common format for sports contests involves pairwise matches between two teams, with the #1 player of team A matched against the #1 player of team B, the #2 player of team A against the #2 player of team B, and so on. This paper addresses…