Mathematical Strategies for the Most Popular Games | Hacker News Reader

Mathematical Strategies for the Most Popular Games

washingtonpost.com

39 pointsvinchuco7 comments

Misleading title. (The original title is even worse, claiming to give "mathematically proven winning strategies".)

The article is actually about simple models for various games. What are the most popular chess moves. Thinking of Diplomacy as a graph. Etc. Not particularly deep.

Thanks. Every time I see a WP link on hn these days, I first visit the comments to see what the actual content behind the clickbait title is, because the site has become so deliberately misleading.

Those "house percentage" numbers in the last section don't make any sense to me. House edges per bet aren't nearly that bad[1] (and if they were nobody would ever have fun at casinos), and if the numbers are based on the average amount players wagered and lost, then there are a ton of biasing factors that make the claim "Your best bet is the $100 slot machines, where casinos take only 3.6 percent of your money." misleading at best. For example, I'm guessing that the average person pulls the lever on $100 slots far fewer times than on the $1 slots. In which case the advice should be to play a single hand of video poker.

Also, the correct advice is to play bet/come-line-craps: it's social, involves throwing dice, and has a very small house edge (and very high variance, which is the point of going to a casino!).

[1] http://gaming.unlv.edu/casinomath.html

A point of clarification regarding the pass/come-line in line in craps. , pass-line bet by it's self is not that great of a bet. With a house edge of 1.41% which while good is not the best in the casino. What makes pass line bet so good is that when a point is set, if you made a bet on the pass line you are allowed to make the "odds" bet which is a bet with 0% house edge. (Yes that's right 0%, but remember to make this bet we have to have already made a bet with a house edge.) If the table allows you to make a 100x(the pass line bet on the odds) you can push the overall house edge down to 0.02%. However on the cheap $10 min table this would require a min bet of ~$1015 every point. So not for the faint of heart.

"To win a game of Battleship, you need to do two things: maximize your probability of getting a hit at every turn, and hope your opponent doesn't do the same."

Not exactly. You need to maximize the amount of information you get about the distribution of your opponent's ships with each shot, and distribute your own ships in such a way that it minimizes the amount of information your opponent is able to gather with theirs. And of course you need to take into account that your opponent has the same goals (the probability grid for hitting ships shown in the article of course ignores that your opponent, knowing the center is a juicier target for you, could choose to place her ships around the edges.)

It's also a race to apply what you know. Knowing exactly where all your enemy's ships are is won't help if you don't have enough turns to hit them before your own ships are removed.

it is not mathemical strategies but just bare visualisation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com