Re: ASL and the joy of mathematics

Good math!

Can I repost this on the Facebook Bounding Fire page?

Sam

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Alain Borel <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> last week-end I and 15 other guys met in Lyon, France, for a small
> tournament that's been happening for several years now. The attendance
> was mostly French (obviously) with people from Lyon, Marseille and
> Lille. But there was an international element with yours truly from
> nearby Switzerland, as well as Tim "American by birth, French by heart"
> Hundsdorfer - who, I was very pleased to learn, doesn't live all that
> far from my place. Great fun and excellent food was had by all :-) Many
> thanks to Lionel Dondé and his team for organizing this.
>
> I will not go too much into the details of the tournament, let's just
> say I finished at rank 12 out of 16, my best performance so far. For
> more details, use either your highschool French skills or Google
> Translate on the French ASL forum:
>
> http://aslforum.histofig.com/smf/index.php?topic=9615.0
>
> During the one game I won (ESG91 It's not over, with me as the French),
> a most unlikely thing happened:
>
> - my opponent easily passed a MC, but triggered my sniper (nothing
> incredible so far)
> - the Sniper rolled a 1 (rare, but OK, such things happen)
> - after moving the Sniper, the nearest enemy stack was a Melee
> containing a very scared HS on my side, a 9-2 Leader + 2 squads + the
> enemy Sniper (you don't get such targets everyday, right?)
> - I decided not to target the Axis Sniper and rolled for Random
> Selection; guess what, I got the Leader!
> - both Squads rolled boxcars for their LLMC!
>
> Needless to say, this cleared up the situation quite a bit for me. I
> mean, what were the odds?
>
> WHAT WERE THE ODDS? I couldn't leave this question unanswered and
> decided to investigate.
> Here are the steps we can use to calculate the final probability:
>
> 1) Sniper rolls 1, easy, that's 1/6 = 16.67%
> 2) both squads roll boxcars, easy too, that's 1/36 times 1/36 = 0.077%
> 3) Random selection hitting the Leader, this is more complicated:
>  - the Leader dr could be 6, and he would be hit in all cases (100%, or
> 216/216 as we'll use it here);
>  - it could be 5, and all other drs should be 5 or less, with odds of
> 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 = 25/216;
>  - it could be 4, and all other drs should be 4 or less, with odds of
> 4/6 * 4/6 * 4/6 = 64/216;
>  - and so on until Leader dr = 1 and odds of 1/6*1/6*1/6 = 1/216;
>  - now we add all these odds multiplied by 1/6 (probability of each
> possible Leader dr) for a total of
>    1/6 * 395/216 = 30.48% (I was surprised by this rather high number
>
> So the final probability of this result (neglecting the original MC,
> which we could evaluate easily
> if needed, and Sniper direction, which is almost impossible to determine
> in my opinion) is
>
> 16.67% * 0.077% * 30.48% = 0.0039%
>
> I feel even luckier now that I know the number :-)
>
> Alain Borel
> Switzerland
>
> _______________________________________________
> Aslml mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.aslml.net/listinfo.cgi/aslml-aslml.net
> To unsubscribe, visit the above website, or email [email protected]
>
_______________________________________________
Aslml mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.aslml.net/listinfo.cgi/aslml-aslml.net
To unsubscribe, visit the above website, or email [email protected]