Sunday, December 27, 2020

quick computation

It's not deep, but this sort of computation comes up all the time and I wonder if there's a shortcut.
I have to capture the (8) -- and I want to maximize my chances of being able to capture the (20) on a subsequent turn -- but which die should I use?  ONE die choice  is obviously wrong, I didn't have to do the math to know that -- but the other two seemed pretty close.  I did do the math and discovered about a 4% difference between them, maybe that's too close to tell by general principles without crunching the numbers -- but one is a bit above 50% and the other a bit below.

Monday, December 7, 2020

not deep, but I was mildly surprised when I did the computation

I have four possible attacks. One of them is obviously suboptimal, but the others all give roughly similar chances of winning. Or do they? Which one is best?