The last banana: A thought experiment in probability - Leonardo Barichello
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-last-banana-a-thought-experiment-in-probability-leonardo-barichello Imagine a game of dice: if the biggest number rolled is one, two, three,...
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You and a fellow castaway are stranded on a desert island playing dice for the last banana. You've agreed on these rules: You'll roll two dice, and if the biggest number is one, two, three or four, player one wins. If the biggest number is five or six, player two wins. Let's try twice more. Here, player one wins, and here it's player two. So who do you want to be? At first glance, it may seem like player one has the advantage since she'll win if any one of four numbers is the highest, but actually, player two has an approximately 56% chance of winning each match. One way to see that is to list all the possible combinations you could get by rolling two dice, and then count up the ones that each player wins. These are the possi...
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You and a fellow castaway are stranded on a desert island playing dice for the last banana. You've agreed on these rules: You'll roll two dice, and if the biggest number is one, two, three or four, player one wins. If the biggest number is five or six, player two wins. Let's try twice more. Here, player one wins, and here it's player two. So who do you want to be? At first glance, it may seem like player one has the advantage since she'll win if any one of four numbers is the highest, but actually, player two has an approximately 56% chance of winning each match. One way to see that is to list all the possible combinations you could get by rolling two dice, and then count up the ones that each player wins. These are the possi...
