Game Theory is a branch of mathematics which economists happen to find very useful. The reason is that Game Theory concerns itself with situations involving some type of competition, or “games,” where players can make moves independent of one another. This setup is analogous to companies, the players, competing for customers, and whichever can gain
The logic problem goes as follows: ” There are one hundred prisoners, each numbered one through one hundred. In an adjacent room, there are 100 boxes, also numbered one through one hundred. Each box holds a slip of paper, also numbered one through one hundred however each slip of paper is randomly inserted into each
For this post I will be showing you how to build a dice rolling simulator and, more largely, how to calculate then simulate problems known as “coupon collector” problems, all using Excel and VBA. Starting off with the question, how many rolls of a die would you expect to need in order to roll all six sides
This is my take on the Toads and Frogs logic puzzle. Instead of Frogs and Toads however, I will be using one of my favorite animals, the mighty ostrich. “Three pink ostriches are heading south to get home and run into three blue ostriches on a very narrow path in the savanna. The three blue ostriches are also heading home but their
This time we’re looking at something called the Josephus problem. As far as I can tell this is based off of an actual event in history or is at least attributed to a historical figure, Titus Flavius Josephus. Here is the basic set up: Josephus and 40 other of his fellow Jewish soldiers are surrounded and will
Everything in this blog post will be about those uniquely fascinating numbers known as prime numbers. I will be explaining how to build something known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which I will explain in detail later. The sieve will be able to spit out all the prime numbers between 2 and an arbitrarily large number of
In this post we are going to build a maze solver in Excel using VBA, to do this we will simulate a little person walking through a maze, they will be practicing the “right-hand rule,” that is, you can successfully escape any maze by placing your right hand (or left I suppose, as long as
This will be the third and final blog post regarding the Monty Hall problem. The aim of the build this time is to make something that is both highly functional and stunningly beautiful. Since all we are concerned with this time is raw data it would be nice to have an exciting way of presenting
This is the second blog post dealing with the Monty Hall Problem. In the first post, we laid out all the code and set up the groundwork in order to get a functioning game simulator. In this post we will be building on that skeleton and making a polished game. The first major change we
Monty Hall Problem 1 This first blog post will be part one of three. The purpose here will be to start building a basic program in Excel to show you how you can actualize quite complex ideas using only a very basic understanding of VBA. As will be the case with most of my posts, I