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Nice to read about mathematics that involves Set! I found out about Set here on Hacker News several years ago, when I read Peter Norvig's blog post on the odds
by henrik_w 10y ago
Nice to read about mathematics that involves Set! I found out about Set here on Hacker News several years ago, when I read Peter Norvig's blog post on the odds of not finding a set in the 12 cards [1]. I had never heard about the game before, but tried it and really liked it.
The simplicity of the rules, the mathematical nature of it, and the fact that adults and kinds can play together makes it such a great game. I continued with the analysis of finding the odds of not set in each round of play, and had fun doing so. It seems very difficult to find an analytical solution (and quite beyond me), but simulation was a nice project that gave some good insights into how the odds vary over the rounds played [2].
[1] http://norvig.com/SET.html http://norvig.com/SET.html
[2] https://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-revisited/ https://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-revisit...
- zem 10y agothe similar but easier game "spot it!" works better for playing with kids, i find. (i prefer it as an adult too - i thought i'd love set, but playing it feels more like work than fun to me.)
- dkurth 10y agoThere's some interesting analysis of the math behind Spot It! on stackoverflow [1]. That post mentions the Fano Plane, which, incidentally, I first read about in the book How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician quoted in the article about Set that started this thread. In the book, he uses the Fano Plane to explain how to pick numbers for a specific kind of lottery. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6240113/what-are-the-mathematical-computational-principles-behind-this-game http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6240113/what-are-the-math...
- zem 10y agothanks, that was a beautiful thread! also a really good diagram explaining the projective plane.