What's New - February 2012
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February 7, 2012: Here are two more probability problem solvers which I found more interesting than anything else I had to work on this week. Fifty Probability Problems, Version 4 was added today:
Problem 18: If 100 coins are tossed, what is the probability that exactly 50 heads will be showing?
Problem 19: Samuel Pepys wrote Isaac Newton to ask which of these events is more likely: that a person get (a) at least 1 six when 6 dice are rolled. (b) at least 2 sixes when 12 dice are rolled, or (c) at least 3 sixes when 18 dice are rolled. What is the answer?
February 21, 2012: I've spent much of the past couple of weeks travel planning for our next family cruise in March during the grandkids' spring break. Zip lining in St. Kitts - whoopee!
I spent most of my programming time on a dead end (so far) effort to create a program start or stop and restart a program based on a schedule or CPU or memory usage. I need this to workaround a commercial weather system program which crashes periodically because it has a memory leak.
In the end, I decided to tackle another problem from the Fifty Probability Programs book I'm working my way through. This one about a three way "duel" is similar to one previously posted and, since I haven't cracked the analytical solution yet, Car Talk Shootout Version 2 now includes the experimental results for the new problem as well.
February 27, 2012: Fifty Probability Problems, Version 5 adds a fifth problem from the book, the hardest one yet, but a good chance to learn about using geometric progressions to solve a puzzle concerning chances for a poor shot to win a 3-way shootout.