I was re-reading How to Gamble if you Must by Dubins and Savage and though it would be fun to talk through the gambling problem in the beginning of the book with my younger son.
The book isn’t exactly light reading, but definitely interesting if you want to understand a bit of the math behind gambling
The problem is fairly straightforward to understand -> you start with $1,000 and you need to get to $10,000 by making bets. How should you bet if the game is unfavorable, fair, and favorable?
I started the project today by explaining the game to my son and asking how he thought you should bet in the various games:
Next we wrote a short program in Mathematica (off camera) and then played the game. Here’s a discussion of the program and a few times through the unfavorable game:
Now we played the fair game and looked to see if the strategy was the same or different than the unfavorable game:
Finally, we played the favorable game – again we looked for what might be different in the betting strategy for this game:
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