The topic of probability came up recently in several discussion threads and it reminded me of a coin flip game an old buddy of mine told me about a few years ago. The game is very simple, everyone in the country gets a quarter to use for the game, and any time you come across someone who is still in the game, one of you flips a coin. Whoever wins gets the coins of the other and the loser is out. (We'll assume the coin flips are fair and there is no trickery going on, maybe you have to throw the coin over your head and let it land on the ground).
Suppose we continue this game until there is only one player left, what can we say about the guy who wins all of the money? Did God want him to win? It certainly might feel that way to him, he just beat out a whole bunch of people. It's not a skill based game, so he can't credit practice, he can't honestly say he is good at flipping coins, he just got lucky. The thing is, somebody had to win. If there is a God, he might decide to manipulate our fair coin tosses and make it so that particular guy wins. But if there is no God, or if God is not interested in this game, somebody would have to win, it could be anyone and it has to be someone.
If the country we are talking about is the united states, the odds of any particular person winning is about 1 in 300,000,000. It might seem that with odds this drastically low it would be impossible for it to happen by chance. There must have been someone or something guiding the coin flips for him to overcome those impossibly low odds of winning. But that is just not the case. It is true that for that guy, the odds of winning were one in three hundred million. But there are three hundred million people all with the same odds. If you look at the entire situation instead of the one guy who happened to win, it doesn't seem so crazy.
The best way to play this game is to hideout in your house until you see the news that one person has all the coins except one, yours. Then seek him or her out for a 50/50 shot of turning your .25 cents into $75,000,000.
ReplyDeleteThat's a really good point. Perhaps the rules need to be altered so that if you lose a coin flip you only need to give as many quarters to the other person as they have.
DeleteThis actually reminds me of a Derren Brown special I once saw.
ReplyDeleteReally good program, thanks for the suggestion. I have heard of scams along this line before so I had a pretty good idea how this would turn out almost right from the start, but it was still entertaining to watch. The sad thing is I bet this kind of thing isn't too uncommon, and at the end what would normally happen is he would sell you a bogus system instead of explaining how he did it.
DeleteKnowing about it is good. I liked how the program compensated the money for people that lost the bets
ReplyDeleteyeah me too, I was actually a bit upset leading up to it because I knew a lot of people would be out money because of this. It's still their own fault because they made the bed, but still they were being manipulated.
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