GeekDad Puzzle of the Week – Stick Stac Toe
What is the benefit of going first in a random tic-tac-toe game? Does it change if you can “aim” and increase your odds for the center square?
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Tag: probability
GeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution – Black Eye Odds
Did you correctly simulate or calculate the odds for each player winning a game of Black Eye? Is the $50 ThinkGeek certificate prize for this week’s GeekDad Puzzle of the Week have your name on it?
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GeekDad Puzzle of the Week – Black Eye Odds
What are the odds for each player playing Black Eye, given their playing style and past history? Determine their chances, and a ThinkGeek Gift certificate could be yours…
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GeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution – Roshambo Strategery
How did your paper-scssors-rock strategy fare?
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GeekDad Puzzle of the Week – Roshambo Strategery
Against a few different players, selected at random and with fixed strategies, what is your best “paper-scissors-rock” plan of action?
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GeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution – Bayesian Orthodontics
The solution to last week’s puzzler, and the announcement of the $50 ThinkGeek gift certificate winner!
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GeekDad Puzzle of the Week – Bayesian Orthodontics
Just look at that guy… somehow, him loosing a tooth (loosing, not losing — he knew where it was the entire time!) made him even more adorable.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: How to Bullseye a Womp Rat
First Luke had to survive the surface run. Then he had to survive long enough in the trench with Vader on his tail to get off a clean shot. Then he had to pull the trigger within the very short …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: How to Bullseye a Womp Rat
The Death Star has been all the rage lately, from the White House petition to the recent Kickstarter. So I thought it would be worth taking a look at the fate of the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station. Specifically, what was …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution: Ping Pong Probability
Ping pong (or table tennis) is a game of both odds and luck. Most games I have seen have been rather one sided — it is really rare that two players are really at the same level. Pretty much every …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Ping Pong Probability
Ping pong (or table tennis) is a game of both odds and luck. Most games I have seen have been rather one sided — it is really rare that two players are really at the same level. Pretty much every …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Present Game
It turns out my kids are experts at determining expected value: the size, weight and number of presents under the tree have now been precisely determined and weighed against each other to determine fairness, which, it also turns out, is …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: The Present Game
Imagine a row of seven presents. Their values are $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6 and $40. You don’t know what’s inside and so don’t know which present matches each value. It costs $7 to pick a present at random. …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution: Back to School Bugs
Everyone has had that dream that wakes you up in the middle of the night. You know the one, where you suddenly remember that you are not only still enrolled in school, but it is also finals time, and …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Back to School Bugs
After some 104 days of summer vacation, Max and Nora are back in school. One of the big things that my wife Allison and I are concerned about is the fact that most schools are “breeder reactors” for coughs, sniffles, …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Dog Siblings
I discovered yesterday that labradors don’t coexist peacefully with hook-wielding four-year-olds, and so I’m crossing the fishing beach off the list of 200 possible dog outings in Boulder, Colorado. In fact, I’m crossing it off with gusto. At least for …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Dog Siblings
Every once in a while you get a puzzle handed to you. This week I was at the scum hole the city of Boulder, Colorado, calls the dog swimming “beach,” and a guy with a black lab said that his …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Poaching Berries
The berry bushes down the block are heavy with red, ripe raspberries. And so I believe it is my family’s duty to relieve the bushes of some of their burden, lest the weighty berries do long term damage to the …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Poaching Berries
There’s a wonderful patch of raspberries in a yard just down the block from us. It’s on the corner. There’s no fence. And Leif and Kestrel have been poaching berries. Picture a girl in three overlapping pairs of Star Wars …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Potato Hamster at Large
The solution to the past week’s GeekDad Puzzle of the Week.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Potato Hamster at Large
Potato Hamster is at large. On Sunday morning, GeekDad Day, we found the top exercise wheel portion of her cage on the floor, leaving a hole, and the hamster was nowhere to be found. The folks at the pet store …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution: When Are the Odds Even?
The GeekDad Puzzle of the Week from this past week was solved by most using some straightforward snippets of code. While no one was disqualified for claiming to have checked all 1,000,000+ possibilities by hand, most every did admit …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: When Are the Odds Even?
This week’s GeekDad Puzzle of the Week is about simple probability, and came up when Max and I were shooting baskets with crumpled up sheets of paper. Basically, the conversation went that if there were two outcomes (making the basket …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Playing for Games
Nora has been using my iPad for a while now, and is rather adept at playing games on it. She just recently saw the latest version of “infuriated avians” was available, and asked me to buy it. I made her …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution: Dice Games
Chuck-a-luck is a dice game played with three dice that are rolled within a closed container. After wagers on the numbers 1-6 (from each face on a standard die) are placed, the dice are rolled, and payouts are made per …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Dice Games…
In light of this past weekend’s large lottery jackpot (a tax of sorts, on those that aren’t good at math), I thought it most appropriate to have a puzzle-of-the-week based upon a game of chance — chuck-a-luck. Chuck-a-luck is a …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution: Football Squares
Congratulations to the region that hosts the sports team that won the recent televised sporting event! Here is last week’s puzzle: Watching this evening’s televised sporting event (which will remain nameless, so as to save me visits from intellectual property …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Football Squares
Watching this evening’s televised sporting event (which will remain nameless, so as to save me visits from intellectual property lawyers), I remembered that I took part in the curious office practice of wagering on the score of the game at …
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