Over the past year, friends have emailed me many videos from YouTube. This is the 21st century version of emailing a cartoon, joke or inspirational quote. I decided to make a playlist with 10 of the most interesting or funny ones I have received. Enjoy!
I found this puzzle while cruising the Internet today.
A sultan has granted a commoner a chance to marry one of his N daughters. The commoner will be presented with the daughters one at a time and, when each daughter is presented, the commoner will be told the daughter’s dowry (which is fixed in advance). Upon being presented with a daughter, the commoner must immediately decide whether to accept or reject her (he is not allowed to return to a previously rejected daughter). However, the sultan will allow the marriage to take place only if the commoner picks the daughter with the overall highest dowry. Then what is the commoner’s best strategy, assuming he knows nothing about the distribution of dowries?
This is a cool problem because forms of it occur all the time, the classic example being dating/marriage like in this puzzle, but its applicability is definitely not limited to just that. The strategy indicated in the solution is itself not that surprising because I think that’s what most of us do, or least I do, most of the time–that is after a while we pick something. The real question being how long do you wait to pick? What I found surprising is how long to wait under the optimal strategy, and that it’s (only or incredibly) 37% likely to produce the best result. So the bottom line is don’t stress about this kind of problem the next time you encounter it, because there really is no perfect solution and not one that “works” more than 37% of the time anyway.
I wanted to share this story. Last week when I attended the G2E, my entrance included admission to the exhibit halls of the F&B (food and beverage) and Fun Expo (amusement park operators) exhibit halls. These area all related to what happens inside a casino. The F&B conference was impressive for its excesses. There was a huge area for wine and alcohol that was totally free. See photo to the right, and the rest that I posted on flickr. Fun Expo was not bad either with its emphasis on amusement park games. If like me, you have been going too long to geek conferences in the high tech industry, it makes you wonder “What have I been doing?”
We now live in a society where gambling is totally socially acceptable. Poker is on TV all the time. To learn more about this industry, and seek inspiration for my next venture, I attended the
Global Gaming Expo (G2E) 2005 at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). This is a huge show with over 25,000 attendees. It mainly focuses on casinos and casino equipment like slot machines, roulette wheels, and table games. Pretty much any equipment imaginable to run a casino was on display. Some of it is pretty cool like the computerized roulette wheels and blackjack tables. No marketing angle to keep people in the casinos was left unexploited…I mean unrepresented.
I was particularly interested to see how computer technology is being used, and to look at online gaming aka “igaming.” The area for igaming was relatively small since most igaming is still illegal in the USA. I saw at least 2 tablet PC manufacturers displaying handhelds that could be used by casino staff. There was a really amazing application from NICE in NJ which is the subject of my next post. I have posted 29 photos from the show floor on flickr.
I added some recommended books and DVDs to the site using the free Amazon Media Manager (AMM) for Wordpress. Check them out. This plugin is pretty slick, and I was impressed with the quick reply I got from the developer. I am impressed with plugins I am finding. Unfortunately, I had to turn images off for now as this was adversely impacting performance.
Using this plugin also caused me to register into both the Amazon Associates program and Amazon Web Services (AWS) programs which are very interesting themselves.
