#parrondos-paradox

#parrondos-paradox

Pi is an infinitely long decimal number that never repeats. How do we know? Well, humans have calculated it to 314 trillion decimal places and didn't reach the end. At that point, I'm inclined to accept it. I mean, NASA uses only the first 15 decimal places for navigating spacecraft, and that's more than enough for earthly applications.

With its Alpha series of game-playing AIs, Google's DeepMind group seemed to have found a way for its AIs to tackle any game, mastering games like chess and by repeatedly playing itself during training. But then some odd things happened as people started identifying Go positions that would lose against relative newcomers to the game but easily defeat a similar Go-playing AI.

Sometimes the reason pi shows up in randomly generated values is obvious—if there are circles or angles involved, pi is your guy. But sometimes the circle is cleverly hidden, and sometimes the reason pi pops up is a mathematical mystery!

In Texas Hold'em poker, players wager on the best five-card hand they can make among the two cards in their hand and the communal ones on the table. Hands are ranked based on their probability of occurring. A full house, for example, with three cards of the same value (fives or kings, for instance) and two cards of another, is less likely than a flush with any five cards of the same suit. A full house therefore beats a flush.

On October 1, 2022, something strange happened in the Philippines: 433 people won the jackpot in the local lottery. For this particular lotto, six numbers ranging in value from 1 to 55 were randomly selected, and the 433 winners all matched. Even more bizarre, when arranged in ascending order, the winning numbers were: 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and 54. In other words, the winning numbers were multiples of 9 (9 1, 9 2, 9 3, etcetera).

Online poker is a game of intensity, wit and strategy. It demands quick thinking and constant decision-making. Players need to have an astute ability to use their intuition and evaluate all the given information under immense pressure. For most players, their dips in performance around the table are primarily affected by choice fatigue rather than the presence of excellent opponents or bad luck.

The oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was rumoured to have said that his three rules for how to become rich were: Rise early. Work hard. Strike oil. It's one of those eminently quotable remarks because it captures something we all know to be true, that luck and chance have as much to do with success as anything else. Yet we don't value people for their luck.