A university project explaining a phenomenon of a coin tossing game called Penney Ante.

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.

To run the project use PenneyAnte.nb
Open .nb files using Mathematica. You can also use CDF Player but in this case .nb files will not function interactively.

See wiki for a full project description.

Project Samples

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Categories

Education

License

GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)

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Penney Ante Web Site

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Additional Project Details

Languages

English

Programming Language

Mathematica

Related Categories

Mathematica Education Software

Registered

2013-01-17