English

Astumian's Paradox revisited

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

I give a simple analysis of the game that I previously published in Scientific American which shows the paradoxical behavior whereby two losing games randomly combine to form a winning game. The game, modeled on a random walk, requires only two states and is described by a first-order Markov process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/0409029,
  title  = {Astumian's Paradox revisited},
  author = {R. Dean Astumian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0409029},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

3 pages, no figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T19:00:32.263Z