The second lesson of the Royal Institutes mathematics masterclass took place on Tuesday after school. This week, the topic was understanding probability and game theory. A competitive match of rock, paper, scissors started the discussions before they collected and analysed the data. The group investigated how increasing or decreasing the outcomes the game would affect the odds of drawing a match. To which we established a few golden rules of probability:-
- Number of possible outcomes = number of possible moves squared
- Number of possible draws = number of possible moves
However, the most interesting part of the masterclass, was looking into the theory of social situations also known as Game Theory, which highlighted that rock, paper, scissors is not a random game after all, but more strategical due to being able to establish certain patterns within human behaviour.
We are looking forward to the next lesson on “Unexpected patterns in Polish and French Triangles”.
