Coin Games

A university project explaining a phenomenon of a coin tossing game called Penney Ante.
This project has been originally written in Mathematica. Parts of the original project have been later rewritten in Java as a simple frame application.

Penney Ante is a coin tossing game invented in 1969 by a mathematician called Walter Penney. It is played by two players. Each player selects a pattern of three heads and tails. The two patterns must be different. The players then flip a fair coin repeatedly until one of the patterns appears. The winner is a person whose pattern appears first.

Although initially the game appears to be fair, it is not in general. There is no best pattern that beats all others. The best we can do is let our opponent go first and then choose the best possible option that beats his particular pattern. To do so we need to be able to define relations between each two patterns. And this is where the fun begins.

See wiki for a full project description.