I hope you appreciate my attempts to show interesting aspects of mathematics that can also be useful. But here among the “number games” are some really funny stories. 1) The 14 Earths The story began as follows: On a whim (we, that is my partner of many years and still a good friend, Michael), we…
Rating systems are generally intended to put playing strengths into perspective according to universally accepted, fixed and comprehensible rules. This is due to the understandable desire to measure individual participants in a sport. One simply wants to see where one stands, where one’s own team stands or even who is currently number 1 in the…
The step-grandson – the probability calculus So why is probability the stepchild of mathematics? I personally became aware of this only gradually. The simplest and possibly best, immediately obvious reason is this: Those who love mathematics, who are attracted to it, actually have a very special inclination. That is the inclination towards exactness. Mathematics is…
No, not the goat problem again. Yes, the goat problem again. I can still remember the first time I encountered this problem. My highly esteemed fellow programmer Thomas Bez, greetings Thomas, brought me an article like this, in 1990, and seemed very excited. It said that there was a quiz game in America. And in…
1) The rules of the game Black Jack is a card game. Nowadays it is mainly offered in casinos. The version of Black Jack played in private circles in the past was called 17 and 4. Despite a certain relationship between the two games, I will briefly explain the rules of Black Jack here, namely…
The game of Backgammon 1) Rules of the game Backgammon is the game of Man-Errger-Dich-Nicht for big players. But it is the two-player variant. So two players try to move all their checkers around the board. On the way, you can also throw out your opponent’s stones and the first player to finish wins. The…
