January 21, 2014
ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS:
We all are familiar with the game rock, paper,
scissors right? Although I love Sheldon's version, we will use the
original game for our experiment. I partnered with Jamie in our class
and we were told to play 45 games. Cool!!! right??? I will assume that
you all know how to play this popular game but, have you ever asked
yourself if it is a fair game? This is a question I have never thought
of. Jamie and I kept score of each game we played. During the first few
games Jamie told me that I was playing paper a lot. Well of course I
stopped doing that and tried to change it up a bit. Little did I know
was that by her telling me this it was changing the probabilities of who
would win. Let me explain: If Jamie had not told me this she would have
played scissors more often because scissors cuts paper and would have
won more games. I think she was just being nice to me because we ended
up winning equal amounts of games.
Theoretical Probability:
This
is different than Experimental Probability because this is the outcome
under IDEAL conditions. Well my experiment WAS ideal because Jamie gave
away my playing habits but if she had not it would have ended
differently because she would have used the strategy of observation to
win.
Mary
ReplyDeleteI love how much detail you went into on all of the different probabilities. I also love all the videos. I think that showing students videos helps to make light of the subject since math can be a very heavy stressful subject for some. I am sorry that I gave away the "secret strategy" before we played but it did help us to come out exactly at thirds. Maybe next time we play rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock and see if we can keep track of all of those tells. Great Job!!
big band theory can explain everything right. the probability is explained very well in your blog. it is a true challenge and we can teach a variety of ways to teach it stating with rock papers scissors. even including dynamite and spock would prove to be useful
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