More secrets of the maths department are revealed on the internet. On the walk down to acquire sandwiches and milkshakes, our heroes break out the Big Maths.
BigHead: After Sunday's abysmal pub quiz performance, I have determined that if we were Bayesian statisticians, we would never engage in a tie-break, and instead always choose to share the winnings.
SpaceSquid: (rather half-heartedly) Explain.
BigHead: We never win the tie-break. Thus our prior probability of winning the tie-break must at this point be less than a half. It follows that sharing the money is a better strategy than gambling for the whole pot by trying to win the tie-break, because the latter has the smaller expected value.
SpaceSquid: That follows if you assume a linear utility for our winnings, but I think that's questionable.
BigHead: For small sums of money, I don't think there's a problem with saying OH MY GOD A HORSEY!
SpaceSquid: Yay! A horsey! Hello, horsey!
Awestruck silence as horse struts past.
BigHead: It's nice that we can adapt so quickly to changing circumstances, isn't it?
SpaceSquid: Let's talk kittens.
Fun fact: the horse was pulling a gypsy-style caravan, which had in its rear window a sticker reading "100% BASTARD". Nice. Also, Blogspot's spell-check refuses to recognise "half-heartedly", "internet" or even "Blogspot's", but "horsey" is apparently fine. Weird.
No comments:
Post a Comment