Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

datagenetics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 71 posts

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#21

Post by andreasvc »

sigkill wrote: post #4
slug wrote: post #2

Babies are made through love, love is beautiful, ergo babies are beautiful. Q.E.D. (I read the whole post, it was an interesting read)

Extending your discussion, love is nothing but chemicals firing in our brain. Maybe human beings are evolved to trigger release chemicals in the brain when certain conditions are met, which could possibly be deterministic? I agree that each person is different, but we're all same in the same way. Think of the attraction to the opposite sex as a seeded random number. Sure, we don't know the seed but if you know a pers…

Love is "just chemicals" in the same way that anger is "just chemicals". The chemicals are the substrate, but to say that is not very informative. Analogously you also wouldn't say computer software is "just electrons". Beware of "nothing buttery"; reduction is a great thing, but only if we truly understand the reduction (as in, heat is movement of molecules).

Re: determinism, I expect the whole process to be non-deterministic through and through, such that say what you had for breakfast might as well have some amount of influence on your social interactions.

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#22

Post by ErrantX »

SonicSoul wrote: post #14
adamc wrote: post #6

It didn't seem like much of a paradox to me, since game B is really two different games, and interleaving plays of game A changes the likelihood of playing B1 vs. B2. Interesting, perhaps, but not terribly unintuitive.

the un-intuitive part is that the odds supposedly flip in your favor just by alternating 2 games with negative odds.

I'm not so sure; when you read the description for Game B it should be clear that it's odds rely on your balance, an external factor.

As that is something that can be manipulated then it isn't a major leap, I think, to the idea that combinations of the two games would produce different outcomes - and that some outcomes would be positive.

Whilst fun; I rather preferred the latter part of the post - it reminded me of a brilliant book I had as a kid with many such puzzles in it :)

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#23

Post by brilee »

Uh... Something's fishy with the first graph of the 'drunken man's walk'. It's well known that the random walk veers away from the zero-line at a rate sqrt(N), where N is number of flips. Normalized by the number of flips, the random walk converges to the zero-line at the rate 1/sqrt(N). The graph does neither, so I'm not quite sure how it was generated...

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#24

Post by [deleted] »

brilee wrote: post #23

Uh... Something's fishy with the first graph of the 'drunken man's walk'. It's well known that the random walk veers away from the zero-line at a rate sqrt(N), where N is number of flips. Normalized by the number of flips, the random walk converges to the zero-line at the rate 1/sqrt(N). The graph does neither, so I'm not quite sure how it was generated...

[deleted]

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#25

Post by brilee »

brilee wrote: post #23

Uh... Something's fishy with the first graph of the 'drunken man's walk'. It's well known that the random walk veers away from the zero-line at a rate sqrt(N), where N is number of flips. Normalized by the number of flips, the random walk converges to the zero-line at the rate 1/sqrt(N). The graph does neither, so I'm not quite sure how it was generated...

Oops, I misinterpreted how the graph was generated... but the complaint still holds. The averaging of a million trials will cut the amplitude of the fluctuations by a factor of 1000, but the sqrt(N) effect should still be visible. (Note that if you multiply the Y-axis by sqrt(million) = 1000, then you get a scale of about 20, which is approx sqrt(500))

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#26

Post by legaultmarc »

GavinB wrote: post #13

Isn't it a little sketchy to have one of the "games" be a game that takes into account outside information like your balanace? Here's another "paradox": Game A: You lose a dollar every time. Game B: If the last game you played was game A, you win a million dollars. Otherwise, you lose a dollar. AAAAAAA... loses, BBBBBBB... loses, but ABABABABA... makes you rich! Suddenly it doesn't seem so paradoxical to me.

The author does say that the Parrondo's paradox only works if the games are not independent. It still is paradoxal that "A combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy".

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#27

Post by Almaviva »

adamc wrote: post #6

It didn't seem like much of a paradox to me, since game B is really two different games, and interleaving plays of game A changes the likelihood of playing B1 vs. B2. Interesting, perhaps, but not terribly unintuitive.

I agree. Imagine that time is used (instead of current balance), and A pays out if the current second is divisible by three, and B pays out if it is one more than a multiple of three. A and B are both losing games if played every second, but it's not hard to combine them to win. And few people would call this a paradox.

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#29

Post by viggity »

I was expecting something more along the lines of actual genetics, in which case two ugly parents make stunning children all the time. It is called hybrid vigor. The overwhelming amount of our produce is bred this way. They will inbreed corn like made so that it is 100% homozygous, but do it in five different pools. The resulting offspring of any two inbreds from two different pools is amazing. Inbred corn plants are about 4-5 feet tall and ugly as sin, but their offspring are 8 feet tall and near perfect.

Re: Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby

#30

Post by brucehart »

n09n wrote: post #19
brucehart wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is saying the opposite. The downtown train arrives on the hour and the uptown train arrives at 5 minutes after the hour.

No, he does not say the opposite: >even though the trains arrive with the same frequency, the downtown train departs just a few minutes after the uptown train has departed. Because of this, there is only a narrow time window in which the man is able to get on the uptown train. He should say it like you suggested though.

You're right. I was looking at the diagram. Clearly the author accidentally swapped the two names in that sentence.
Post reply on HN