Decisions, Decisions

Not What to Decide, but How

Dan Goldstein is Assistant Professor at London Business School and Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. See full bio

November 12, 2008, Behavioral Economics

Comments on "Let's find the world's best player of this game"

Let's find the world's best player of this game

By Dan Goldstein on November 12, 2008 in Decisions, Decisions

Do you have brainy friends in your social network? We're trying to find the best players in the world at a game of skill and luck.

Asymptotic Number of "Bests"

Submitted by SteveM on November 12, 2008 - 10:43am.

This an "Optimal Stopping Rule" type game. There is a probabilistic optimal strategy regardless of the number of elements in the choice stream. (I won't spoil the game by telling you what it is.)

If one can figure out the strategy (or know it because he/she knows statistics) then he/she is "The Best". Deducing the strategy is the real metric, not the number of serial successes.

Maybe you want to ask people what strategy they developed and if it is the correct one, how many tries it took them to realize it.

BTW, if the strategy is applied, the longest winning streak will be totally random. However, the absolute probabilities of achieving k wins out of n tries can be explicitly calculated.