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Claremont Colleges

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Games

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Full-Text Articles in Other Mathematics

The Best Way To Knock 'M Down, Arthur T. Benjamin, Matthew T. Fluet '99 Apr 1999

The Best Way To Knock 'M Down, Arthur T. Benjamin, Matthew T. Fluet '99

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

"Knock 'm Down" is a game of dice that is so easy to learn that it is being played in classrooms around the world. Although this game has been effective at developing students' intuition about probability [Fendel et al. 1997; Hunt 1998], we will show that lurking underneath this deceptively simple game are many surprising and highly unintuitive results.


Bounds On A Bug, Arthur T. Benjamin, Matthew T. Fluet '99 Jan 1999

Bounds On A Bug, Arthur T. Benjamin, Matthew T. Fluet '99

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

In the game of Cootie, players race to construct a "cootie bug" by rolling a die to collect component parts. Each cootie bug is composed of a body, a head, two eyes, one nose, two antennae, and six legs. Players must first acquire the body of the bug by rolling a 1. Next, they must roll a 2 to add the head to the body. Once the body and head are both in place, the remaining body parts can be obtained in any order by rolling two 3s for the eyes, one 4 for the nose, two 5s for the …


Optimal Klappenspiel, Arthur T. Benjamin, Derek Stanford '93 Jan 1995

Optimal Klappenspiel, Arthur T. Benjamin, Derek Stanford '93

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

The game Klappenspiel ("flipping game") is a traditional German game of flipping tiles according to dice rolls. In this paper, we derive the optimal strategy for this game by using dynamic programming. We show that the probability of winning using the optimal strategy is 0.30%.