The Card Game You Can (almost) Always Win

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WOVEN MATH!!!

The easiest fair games depend on equal, binary outcomes like flipping a coin or drawing a playing card that can only be either red or black. If a game depends on both players choosing an equally-probable outcome, how can one player have a massive advantage over the other?

Welcome to the Humble-Nishiyama Randomness Game, a variant of Walter Penney’s classic demonstration of the power of non-transitivity in simple games. In a straightforward transitive situation, A beats B and B beats C — which means A beats C, too. But if A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A… we’ve gone non-transitive just like Rock, Paper, Scissors. By jumping into the non-transitive game loop at the most advantageous point, Player 2 can become an overwhelming favorite every time. It looks like dumb luck, but it’s really just smart math.

And now introducing… WOVEN MATH.

Woven Math bridges recreational mathematics and art by infusing beautiful designs with cerebellum-busting concepts.

I created Woven Math to crackle the synapses of Vsauce2’s subscribers — the ones who love to explore paradoxes, math games, riddles and more. If you like uncovering the stunning depth below seemingly simple concepts, then Woven Math is for you.

After 9 years and 400 videos drilling into the core of hard science and math, I’m crafting clothing and art that celebrates surprising and complex ideas with a distinctly Vsauce2 aesthetic. It’s amazing to understand the world around us — and Woven Math finally makes being cerebral look dope.

Check out my opening designs — soft, comfortable shirts and hoodies that depict Zeno’s paradox of Achilles vs. the Tortoise and a visual proof without words of The Pizza Theorem. And there’s also a striking matte poster stylizing the epic battle of convergence between the fastest and the slowest: https://represent.com/store/vsauce2

*** SOURCES ***

“Penney Ante: Counterintuitive Probabilities in Coin Tossing,” by RS Nickerson: http://www.math.unl.edu/~sdunbar1/ProbabilityTheory/BackgroundPapers/Penney%20ante/PenneyAnte_CounterintuitiveProbabilities.pdf

“Humble-Nishiyama Randomness Game – A New Variation on Penney’s Coin Game,” by Steve Humble and Yutaka Nishiyama: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.177.1176

“Probability of a tossed coin landing on edge,” by Daniel B. Murray and Scott W. Teare: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.48.2547

“Antibiotic-mediated antagonism leads to a bacterial game of rock–paper–scissors in vivo,” by Benjamin C. Kirkup & Margaret A. Riley: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02429

*** LINKS ***

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Hosted and Produced by Kevin Lieber
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Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/thecreateunknown

Research And Writing by Matthew Tabor
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Editing by AspectScience
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Huge Thanks To Paula Lieber
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