You never know exactly what will happen... unless you've got 100% probability. Or just crazy luck.
At first it was hard to express. I had the idea in my mind, but I found it hard to write out. It’s like when you’re looking for the right word, but you don’t know what it is or how to describe it really. The idea was that with p people in a circle and a skip rate of s leaving the winner the rth person, then with p+1 people in a circle and a skip rate of s, the winner could be determined by eliminating the sth person, then counting r people from that person. So, the winner would be the (s+r)th person for a game of p+1 people with a skip rate of s.
Math is all around us in life, but games are too. Games provide entertainment. They create environments, moods, cooperation, friends, money, losses, among many things. You’ve probably heard somewhere that “Life is just a game”, but whether that’s true is another story in itself. I think it will be quite interesting to learn about games with math. Lately games have been broken down to mere tricks of strategy. Even poker is being filled with “math nerds” who calculate odds and play precisely, quickly and accurately. Players of luck or skill are few, and so gaming is becoming an increasingly more mathematic, scientific type of endeavor.
This change interests me a lot; I’m the type of person who just plays, usually without a strategy, mostly because I don’t know how to find a strategy efficiently. Strategies can be hard to find without good logic, and strategies can be quite complicated the more complex the game is. I’m not good at remembering things, but I think that if I can better understand the logic and patterns behind games in general, I won’t have to memorize strategies. I’ll be able to “derive” them and have fun. This week’s just the beginning, and it’ll get more and more interesting from here on out. Cheers!
We’ll be studying the mathematics of games a lot this year. It is fun to think about them in this new way!