Penney's Game

Penney's game, named after its inventor Walter Penney, is a binary (head/tail) sequence generating game between two players. At the start of the game, the two players agree on the length of the sequences to be generated. This length is usually taken to be three, but can be any larger number. Player A then selects a sequence of heads and tails of the required length, and shows this sequence to player B. Player B then selects another sequence of heads and tails of the same length. Subsequently, a fair coin is tossed until either player A's or player B's sequence appears as a consecutive subsequence of the coin toss outcomes. The player whose sequence appears first wins.

Provided sequences of at least length three are used, the second player (B) has an edge over the starting player (A). This is because the game is nontransitive such that for any given sequence of length three or longer one can find another sequence that has higher probability of occurring first.

Read more about Penney's Game:  Analysis of The Three-bit Game, Strategy For More Than Three Bits, Variation With Playing Cards, See Also

Famous quotes containing the word game:

    “Wild Bill was indulging in his favorite pastime of a friendly game of cards in the old No. 10 saloon. For the second time in his career, he was sitting with his back to an open door. Jack McCall walked in, shot him through the back of the head, and rushed from the place, only to be captured shortly afterward. Wild Bill’s dead hand held aces and eights, and from that time on this has been known in the West as “the dead man’s hand.””
    —State of South Dakota, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)