{"id":228,"date":"2008-01-30T17:44:40","date_gmt":"2008-01-30T21:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=220"},"modified":"2008-01-30T17:44:40","modified_gmt":"2008-01-30T21:44:40","slug":"dice-games-and-orstat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/01\/30\/dice-games-and-orstat\/","title":{"rendered":"Dice, Games, and ORStat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/staff.feweb.vu.nl\/tijms\/foto.jpg\" align=\"left\" height=\"181\" hspace=\"5\" width=\"123\" \/>Last year, I received a paper from Prof. Henk Tijms of the Vrije University Amsterdam on using stochastic dynamic programming to analyze some simple dice games (<a href=\"http:\/\/staff.feweb.vu.nl\/tijms\/morfismospaper.pdf\">pdf version available<\/a>).  A few years ago, I tried to do something similar with an analysis of a game I called Flip, but which is more commonly known as &#8220;Close the Box&#8221; (the paper appeared in <a href=\"http:\/\/ite.pubs.informs.org\/Vol2No1\/Trick\/Trick.php\"><em>INFORMS Transactions on Education<\/em><\/a>).  Both Tijms&#8217; work and mine spend a fair amount of time discussing how well certain easy heuristics do relative to optimal decision making in simple games.   Ideally, heuristics would get good, but not optimal solutions:  that would make the game challenging as players tried to come up with better and better heuristics.  For &#8220;Close the Box&#8221;, while the optimal decision was quite subtle, some simple heuristics got pretty close (perhaps too close to discern the difference).  These games make good classroom demonstrations and even better mini-projects for summer schools and the like.  Tijms&#8217; paper was written for a journal aimed at students.<\/p>\n<p>Tijms has also done the field a great service by making his software for applied probability available, which are good tools for education.  Check it out at <a href=\"http:\/\/staff.feweb.vu.nl\/tijms\/\">his web page.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last year, I received a paper from Prof. Henk Tijms of the Vrije University Amsterdam on using stochastic dynamic programming to analyze some simple dice games (pdf version available). A few years ago, I tried to do something similar with an analysis of a game I called Flip, but which is more commonly known as &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/01\/30\/dice-games-and-orstat\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Dice, Games, and ORStat&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web","category-education"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}