There has not been a puzzle here in a while, so… Alice is playing a card game with her nephew, Bob, using a standard deck of playing cards. Alice starts with the 26 red cards in her hand, and…| Possibly Wrong
The following problem is from the Fiddler (the “spiritual successor to FiveThirtyEight’s The Riddler column”), involving the game of tenpin bowling with traditional scoring: If yo…| Possibly Wrong
Introduction Let’s play a game: I will repeatedly flip a fair coin, showing you the result of each flip, until you say to stop, at which point you win an amount equal to the fraction of obser…| Possibly Wrong
Introduction This is a follow-up to an article from nearly a decade ago, answering what I didn’t recognize at the time as an interesting question, buried in an otherwise offhand remark. To re…| Possibly Wrong
For the past six years, I have been maintaining (on GitHub) a machine-readable record of outcomes of the NCAA men’s basketball tournaments, over the now four decades since the current 64-team…| Possibly Wrong
I recently saw a WOW board, which seems to be a popular approach to rewarding positive behaviors in elementary classrooms. The idea is pretty simple: start with an $latex n \times n$ grid (usually …| Possibly Wrong
Introduction I think the game of blackjack would be relatively boring, mathematically speaking, if not for splitting pairs. But that one additional playing strategy option makes analyzing the game much more challenging and interesting: if you are dealt a pair … Continue reading →| Possibly Wrong
Suppose that couples want to participate in a Secret Santa gift exchange, where each person is secretly assigned to give a gift to one other person in the group. We need a procedure to randomize the gift-giving assignments, subject to … Continue reading →| Possibly Wrong
Introduction Let’s play a card game for money. For example, I (the “house”) will thoroughly shuffle together six decks of playing cards, and deal a round of blackjack against you (the “player”). That is the scenario motivating this post, but … Continue reading →| Possibly Wrong
Introduction Alice and Bob are at it again, this time playing a game called Binary Search. Alice begins by secretly selecting an integer key from 1 to , then Bob makes a series of integer guesses, to each of which … Continue reading →| Possibly Wrong