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Researchers Create a Statistical Guide To Gambling
New submitter yukiloo writes "An early Christmas treat for the ordinary Joe who is stuck with a Christmas list that he cannot afford and is running out of time comes from two mathematicians (Evangelos Georgiadis, MIT, and Doron Zeilberger, Rutgers) and a computer scientist (Shalosh B. Ekhad). In their paper 'How to gamble if you're in a hurry,' they present algorithmic strategies and reclaim the world of gambling, which they say has up till recently flourished on the continuous Kolmogorov paradigm by some sugary discrete code that could make us hopefully richer, if not wiser. It's interesting since their work applies an advanced version of what seems to be the Kelly criterion."
Half this submission makes no sense, grammatically or otherwise.
The news story posted on Slashdot not that long ago on a casino successfully suing a gambler of all his winnings because the machine's system for preventing you from winning wasn't working tells me that the only paradigm in use is "give us your money... or else!"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The three authors completely agree on the mathematics, but they have somewhat different views about the
significance of this project. Here they are.
Evangelos Georgiadis’ Conclusion
We provided a playful yet algorithmic glimpse to a field that has up till recently flourished on the Kolmogorov,
measure-theoretic paradigm [as evidenced by the work of Dubins and Savage [4] (see [7] for more recent
developments]. The advent and omnipresence of computers, however, ushered an era of symbol crunching
and number crunching, where a few lines of code can give rise to powerful algorithms. And it is the ouput
of algorithms that usually provides insight (and inspiration) for conjectures and theorems. Those, in turn,
can then be proven in their respective measure-theoretic settings. Additionally, a computational approach
lends itself easily to more complex scenarios that would otherwise be considered pathological phenomena
(and would be fiendishly time-consuming to prove – even for immortals like Kolmogorov and von Neumann).
Doron Zeilberger’s Conclusion
Traditional mathematicians like Dubins and Savage use traditional proof-based mathematics, and also work
in the framework of continuous probability theory using the pernicious Kolmogorov, measure-theoretic, par-
adigm. This approach was fine when we didn’t have computers, but we can do so much more with both
symbol-crunching and number-crunching, in addition to naive simulation, and develop algorithms and write
software, that ultimately is a much more useful (and rewarding) activity than “proving” yet-another-theorem
in an artificial and fictional continuous, measure-theoretic, world, that is furthermore utterly boring.
Shalosh B. Ekhad’s Conclusion
These humans, they are so emotional! That’s why they never went very far.
Your summary accurately describes the definition of gambling as opposed to investing.
;)
Gambling is placing money at risk with an expectation of loss.
Investing is placing money at risk with an expectation of gain.
I hope I'm not the only one who finds it odd that the state lotteries they sold the public by claiming "The funds will benefit education" would put themselves out of business if people were actually learning math.
I'm not sure if the original submitter had his tongue in cheek by describing the co-author Ekhad as a "computer scientist." Just in case he didn't, note that Shalosh B. Ekhad is actually Zeilberger's computer. Since most of Zeilberger's research depends heavily on computations, and (I think) as a nod to some of his philosophical positions, Zeilberger usually lists his computer as a coauthor on his papers. So I guess Ekhad is a computer scientist, but not quite in the way we usually mean. :)
You don't have to be bad at math to play the lottery. A buck for a ticket is a small price to pay for the entertainment you get when the numbers come up. Especially if your friends play, it can be a social event when the numbers are announced.
Well, honestly, you play correctly. If you're not actually expecting to win, but you find some entertainment in sitting there with your friends waiting for the numbers to come up, more power to you. I don't think you represent the majority, though. I think most of the people playing the lottery are people who spend money that they could actually use for more practical things, in the hope of moving up from poverty. I don't have numbers to back this feeling up, but I do see those local news stories every time the jackpot goes up into the $200 million range with poor schmoes buying hundreds of dollars worth of tickets. Congratulations, dude: you just increased your odds of winning from nearly impossible to still nearly impossible.
The above is not an argument against the lottery, btw. I don't think the government should be in the business of protecting people from their own bad decisions. It is, however, an argument for better public education. People would make less bad decisions if they had the tools to analyze a situation better.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.