1

Sorry for the ambiguous title.

So I was playing Divinity OS when a question popped into my mind about Probability of winning the RPS game.

I gave myself similar question with the following metrics

  • A and B have a coin

  • If it lands Head, A receives $5

  • If it lands Tails, B receives $2

  • First to reach $10 wins

By manual labour I reached conclusion that B had 7/64 chance of winning (I'm not sure if it's correct)

My question is how do I generalize this, IE, say there are 2 or 3 people playing with a fair die, they receive some arbitrary but different amounts and first to $x wins

And how to extend it to more number people?

Anvit
  • 3,449

1 Answers1

0

Your answer looks correct, and computing can be done by a recursive function, e.g. in SageMath:

tot = 10
def f(a,b):
    if a >= tot and b < tot:
        return 0
    if b >= tot and a < tot:
        return 1
    return 1/2*(f(a+5,b)+f(a,b+2))

print f(0,0) # returns 7/64

For 3 people, we need three variables, e.g. using a die where each person chooses a number:

tot = 10
def f(a,b,c):
    if a >= tot and b < tot and c < tot:
        return 0
    if b >= tot and a < tot and c < tot:
        return 0
    if c >= tot and a < tot and b < tot:
        return 1
    return 1/3*(f(a+5,b,c)+f(a,b+2,c)+f(a,b,c+3))

print f(0,0,0) # returns 3226/19683 ~ 0.1638977798
gar
  • 4,988
  • SageMath is based on python? Anyways, I'm not sure how this works, can you elaborate it a bit? Thank you – Anvit May 28 '17 at 14:38
  • Yes, it's based on python. We are defining stopping conditions: depending on who has to be the winner, return 1. Otherwise, continue the recurrence times the probability of going to each branch of the tree. – gar May 28 '17 at 15:35