Monday, April 6, 2009

Here's a game question....

God does not throw dice, Albert Einstein famously declared, but suppose he was wrong. Suppose God decided to demonstrate otherwise by showing up one day at the Institute for Advanced Study. God announces that dice games are in fact wildly popular in heaven, and that the purpose of this visit it to teach a new game to Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. God explains the rules:

There are three blank dice. First, Oppenheimer will take each of the six-sided dice and write the numbers from 1 to 18, in any order he likes, on the 18 faces of the three dice. Einstein will then examine the dice and select one of them as his own. Oppenheimer will then examine the remaining two dice and select one of them. (The third die will be discarded.) Oppenheimer and Einstein will then play repeated rounds of “Dice War” in which they roll the dice simultaneously, with a point being awarded each round to the player who rolls the higher number. The player with the most points wins.

Assume that Oppenheimer and Einstein employ the smartest possible strategies, and that the outcome will be determined by the laws of probability (meaning that God doesn’t skew the dice or the influence the rolls). Which player, if either, is favored to win?