# Britain’s toughest quiz

A year ago that I wrote a post explaining that one of the traditions of the Royal Statistical Society is that every year around Christmas it publishes a quiz that is widely recognised to be one of the toughest out there. The questions are never strictly statistical or mathematical, but they do often require an ability to think laterally and logically, as well as a good general knowledge.

So, in case you’ve nothing better to do over Christmas, this year’s version of the quiz has just been published. Feel free to have a go and submit your answers; otherwise send me your answers and we can submit a team effort. (Teams of up to 5 people are allowed). Don’t worry if you struggle though: my net score prior to last year’s quiz was zero, a value that didn’t change following last year’s quiz.

As a guide to what type of thinking goes into the questions and solutions, here are links to last year’s quiz and solutions.

In any case, happy Christmas and hope you have a great holiday.

# Santa Claus is coming to town

The substance of this post, including the terrible joke in the finale, is all stolen from here.

Look at this graph. The Santas represent points on the graph, and broadly show that the closer you get to Christmas, the more numerous the sightings of Santa. (Presumably in supermarkets and stores, rather than in grottos and sleighs, but you get the idea).

As discussed in previous posts – here, for example – we can measure the extent to which these two variables are related using the correlation coeffiecient. If the data lined up perfectly on an increasing straight line, the correlation would be 1. If the variables were completely unrelated, the correlation would be close to zero. (Unlikely to be exactly zero, due to random variation).

For the Santa data, the correlation is probably around 0.95. It’s not quite 1 for two reasons: first there’s a bit of noise around the general trend between the variables; second, the relationship itself looks slightly curved. But anyway, there’s a clear pattern to be observed: as Christmas approaches, the sightings of Santa increase. And this would manifest itself with a correlation coefficient close to 1.

What’s the effect of this relationship? Well, changing the time period before Christmas – say moving from a month before Christmas to a week before Christmas – will change the number of Santas you’re likely to see. But does it work the other way round? If we dressed a few extra people up as Santa, would it change the number of days left till Christmas? Clearly not. There’s a cause and effect between the two variables in the graphs, but it only works in one direction. The number of days left till Christmas affects the number of Santas you see on the street, but it simply doesn’t work the other way around.

Conclusion:

Correlation doesn’t imply Clausality!

Hohoho.

Footnote: the correct version of this phrase, ‘Correlation doesn’t imply Causality’, was the subject of an earlier post.

# Just lucky

According to world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, the secret to his success is…

Lucky? At chess?

Well, no, actually. This is Carlsen talking about his success at Fantasy Football. At the time of writing, Carlsen’s Premier League Fantasy Football team, Kjell Ankedal, is top of the League:

Top of the league sounds great, but this picture, which shows just the top 10 teams, is a little misleading. The Premier League Fantasy Football League actually has more than 6 million teams, and Kjell Ankedal is currently top of all of them. Moreover, Kjell Ankedal has finished in the top 5% of the league for the past 4 seasons, and in 2017-18 finished 2397th. Again, with 6 million teams the 2017-18 result would place Carlsen in the top  0.04%.

Obviously, football – and by corollary fantasy football –  is a game with many more sources of random intervention than chess, including the referee, the weather, VAR, the managers and just the inevitable chaos that can ensue from the physics of 22 people chasing, kicking and punching a ball. Compare that with the deterministic simplicity of a chess move such as e4.

And yet…

Can it be that Carlsen is ‘just lucky’ at Fantasy Football? Lucky to be top of the league after finishing in the top 5% or so, year after year? Well, we could make some assumptions about Carlsen actually being just an average player, and then work out the probability that he got the set of results he actually got, over this and recent seasons, if he was really just lucky rather than a very good player…

And it would be vanishingly small.

In his Ted Talk, Rasmus Ankersen says that the famous quote ‘The league table never lies’ should be replaced with ‘The league table always lies’. There’s simply too much randomness in football matches for a league table based on 38 matches or so per team to end up with a ranking of teams that reflects their exact ability. And yet, if you look at the top and bottom of most league tables there are very few surprises. League tables are noisy arrangements of teams ranked by their ability, but they are not just total chaos. Better teams generally do better than poorer teams, and teams are never champions or relegated just due to good or bad luck. So, to be in the top few percent of players, consistently over several seasons, with so many people playing is just implausible unless Carlsen is a much-better-than-average player.

So, while it’s true that Carlsen’s precise Fantasy Football ranking is affected to a greater extent by luck than is his world chess ranking, it’s probably a little disingenuous for him to say he’s just been lucky

And maybe it’s no coincidence that someone who’s eminently brilliant at chess turns out also to be eminently brilliant at fantasy football. Maybe one of the keys to Carlsen’s success at chess is an ability to optimise his strategy over the uncertainty in the moves his opponent will make.

Or maybe he’s just brilliant at everything he does.

Obviously, what applies to Carlsen with respect to Fantasy Football applies equally well to betting syndicates trading on football markets. Luck will play a large part in determining short term wins and losses, but in the very long term luck is ironed out, and what determines the success of the syndicate is their skill, judgement and strategy.

# Friday the 13th

Friday 13th. What could possibly go wrong today?

Well, according to people who suffer from Friggatriskaidekaphobia – the fear of Friday 13th – rather a lot. But is there any rationale for a fear of Friday 13th?

The scientific evidence is patchy. One study published in the British Medical Journal – ‘Is Friday the 13th bad for your health‘ – apparently found a 52% increase in hospital admissions from road accidents on Fridays that fell on the 13th of the month, compared with other Fridays.  However, one of the authors, Robert Luben, was subsequently quoted as saying:

It’s quite amusing and written with tongue firmly in cheek. It was written for the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, which usually carries fun or spoof articles.

I guess the authors looked at several possible statistics and reported the one that, by chance, fitted the hypothesis of Friday the 13th being unlucky. We’ve discussed this issue before: if you look at enough different phenomena where there is nothing of interest, some of them will look like there is something interesting happening just by chance. Statistics as a subject can be – and often is – badly misused this way,

Not everyone seemed to see it as a joke though. A follow-up study in the American Journal of Psychiatry titled ‘Traffic Deaths and Superstition on Friday the 13th‘  found a higher accident rate for women, but not men, on Fridays falling on the 13th of the month. This was subsequently contested by another group of researchers who published an article in the Journal BMC Public Health magazine titled ‘Females do not have more injury road accidents on Friday the 13th‘. Who to believe?

So, it’s a mixed bag. Moreover, as reported in Wikipedia – which gives an interesting history of the origins of the superstitions associated with Friday 13th – road accidents, in the Netherlands at least, are less frequent on Friday 13th, arguably because people take more care than usual. But even there I’d be cautious about the results without having a detailed look at the way the statistical analysis was carried out.

And anyway, Tuesday 8th is the new Friday 13th. You’ve been warned.

Footnote: I’m writing this on Thursday 12th, blissfully unaware of whatever horrors this particular Friday 13th will bring.

Stick a monkey on a typewriter, let him hit keys all day, and what will you get? Gibberish, probably. But what if you’re prepared to wait longer than a day? Much longer than a day. Infinitely long, say. In that case, the monkey will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. And indeed any and every other work of literature that’s ever been written.

This is from Wikipedia:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Infinity is a tricky but important concept in mathematics generally. We saw the appearance of infinity in a recent post, where we looked at the infinite sequence of numbers

1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8,….

and asked what their sum would be. And it turned out to be 2. In practice, you can never really add infinitely many numbers, but you can add more and more terms in the sequence, and the more you add the closer you will get to 2. Moreover, you can get as close to 2 as you like by adding sufficiently many terms in the sequence. It’s in this sense that the sum of the infinite sequence is 2.

In Statistics the concept of infinity and infinite sums is equally important, as we’ll discuss in a future post. But meantime… the infinite monkey theorem. What this basically says is that if something can happen in an experiment, and you repeat that experiment often enough, then eventually it will happen.

Sort of. There’s still a possibility that it won’t – the monkey could, by chance, just keep hitting the letter ‘a’ totally at random forever, for example – but that possibility has zero probability. That’s the ‘almost surely’ bit in the Wikipedia definition. On the other hand, with probability 1 – which is to say complete certainty – the monkey will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

Let’s look at the calculations, which are very similar to those in another recent post.

There are roughly 50 keys on a keyboard, so assuming the monkey is just hitting keys at random, the probability that the first key stroke matches the first letter of Shakespeare’s works is 1/50. Similarly, the probability the second letter matches is also 1/50. So to get the first two matching it’s

$1/50 \times 1/50$

Our monkey keeps hitting keys and at each new key stroke, the probability that the match-up continues is multiplied by 1/50. This probability gets small very, very quickly. But it never gets to zero.

Now, if the monkey has to hit N keys to have produced a text as long as the works of Shakespeare, by this argument he’ll get a perfect match with probability

$p=(1/50)^N$

This will be a phenomenally small number. Virtually zero. But, crucially, not zero. Because if our tireless monkey repeats that exercise a large number of times, let’s say M times, then the probability he’ll produces Shakespeare’s works at least once is

$Q = 1-(1-p)^M$

And since p is bigger than zero – albeit only slightly bigger than zero –  then Q gets bigger with N. And just as the sum of the numbers 1, 1/2, 1/4, … gets closer and closer to 2 as the number of terms increases, so Q can be made as close to 1 as we like by choosing M large enough.

Loosely speaking, when M is infinity, the probability is 1. And even more loosely: given an infinite amount of time our monkey is bound to produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

Obviously, both the monkey and the works of Shakespeare are just metaphors, and the idea has been expressed in many different forms in popular culture.  Here’s Eminem’s take on it, for example:

# At The Intersection

You’ll remember Venn diagrams from school. They’re essentially a mathematical tool for laying out the information in partially overlapping sets. And in statistics they are often used in the same way for showing the possible outcomes in events which might overlap.

For example, here’s a Venn diagram showing the relationship between whales and fish:

Whales and fish have some properties that are unique, but they also have some features in common. These are all shown in the appropriate parts of the diagram, with the common elements falling in the part of the sets that overlap – the so-called intersection.

With this in mind, I recently came across the following Venn poem titled ‘At the Intersection’ written by Brian Bilston:

You can probably work it out. There are three poems in total:  separate ones for ‘him’ and ‘her’ and their intersection. Life seen from two different perspectives, the result of which is contained in the intersection.

Genius.

# One-in-a-million

Suppose you can play on either of 2 slot machines:

1. Slot machine A pays out with probability one in a million.
2. Slot machine B pays out with probability one in 10.

Are you more likely to get a payout with one million attempts with slot machine A or with 10 attempts on slot machine B?

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So, there’s a bigger probability (0.65) that you’ll get a payout from 10 spins of slot machine B than from a million spins of slot machine A (probability 0.63).

Hopefully, the calculations above are self-explanatory. But just in case, here’s the detail. Suppose you have N attempts to win with a slot machine that pays out with probability 1/N.

1. First we’ll calculate the probability of zero payouts in the N spins.

2. This means we get a zero payout on every spin.

3. The probability of a zero payout on one spin is one minus the probability of a win: 1 – 1/N.

4. So the probability of no payout on all the spins is

$(1-1/N)^N$

5. And the probability of at least one payout is

$1- (1-1/N)^N$

As explained in the tweet, with N=10 this gives 0.65 and with N=1,000,000 it gives 0.63. The tweet’s author explains in a follow-up tweet that he was expecting the same answer both ways.

But as someone in the discussion pointed out, that logic can’t be right. Suppose you had one attempt with slot machine C which paid out with probability 1. In other words, N=1 in my example above. Then, of course, you’d be bound to get a payout, so the probability of at least one payout is 1. So, although it’s initially perhaps surprising that you’re more likely to get a payout with 10 shots at slot machine B than with a million shots at slot machine A, the dependence on N becomes obvious when you look at the extreme case of slot machine C.

Footnote: What does stay the same in each case however is the average number of times you will win. With N shots at a slot machine with win probability 1/N, you will win on average once for any choice of N. Sometimes you’ll win more often, and sometimes you may not win at all (except when N=1). But the average number of wins if you play many times will always be 1.

# Juvenile dinosaurs

This blog is mostly about Statistics as a science rather than statistics as numbers. But just occasionally the statistics themselves are so shocking, they’re worthy of a mention.

With this in mind I was struck by two statistics of a similar theme in the following tweet from Ben Goldacre (author of the Bad Science website and book):

Moreover, in the discussion following Ben’s tweet, someone linked to the following cartoon figure:

This shows that even if you change the way of measuring distance from time to either phylogenetic distance or physical similarity, the following holds: the distance between a sparrow and T-Rex is smaller than that between T-Rex and Stegosaurus.

Footnote 1: this is more than a joke. Recent research makes the case that there is a strong evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs. As one of the authors writes:

We now understand the relationship between birds and dinosaurs that much better, and we can say that, when we look at birds, we are actually looking at juvenile dinosaurs.

Footnote 2. Continuing the series (also taken from the discussion of Ben’s tweet)… Cleopatra is closer in time to the construction of the space shuttle than the pyramids.

Footnote 3. Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Science, is a great read. It includes many examples of the way science – and Statistics – can be misused.

# Problem solved

A while back I set a puzzle asking you to try to remove three coins from a red square region as shown in the following diagram.

The only rule of the game is that when a coin is removed it is replaced with 2 coins – 1 immediately to the right of and one immediately below the coin that is removed. If there is no space for adding these replacement coins, the coin cannot be removed.

The puzzle actually appeared in a recent edition of Alex Bellos’ Guardian mathematics puzzles, though it was created by the Argentinian mathematician Carlos Sarraute. This is his solution which is astonishing for its breathtaking ingenuity.

The solution starts by giving a value to every square in the grid as follows:

Remember, the grid goes on forever both to the right and downwards. The top left hand box has value 1. Going right from there, every subsequent square has value equal to 1/2 of the previous one. So: 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and so on. The first column is identical to the first row. To complete the second row, we start with the first value, 1/2, and again just keep multiplying by 1/2. The second column is the same as the second row. And we fill the entire grid this same way. Technically, every row and column is a series of geometric numbers: consecutive multiples of a common number, which in this case is 1/2.

Let’s define the value of a coin to be the value of the square its on. Then the total value of the coins at the start of the game is

$1 + \frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{2}= 2$

Now…

• When we remove a coin we replace it with two coins, one immediately to the left and one immediately to the right. But if you look at the value any square on the grid, it is equal to the sum of the values of the squares immediately below and to the right. So when we remove a coin we replace it with two coins whose total value is the same. It follows that the total value of the coins stays unchanged however many moves we make. It will always be 2 however many moves we make.
• This is the only tricky mathematical part. Look at the first row of numbers. It consists of 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8… and goes on forever. But even though this is an infinite sequence it has a finite sum of 2. Obviously, we can never really add infinitely many numbers in practice, but by adding more and more terms in the series we will get closer and closer to the value of 2. Try it on a calculator. In summary:

$1 + \frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{4} + \frac{1}{8} +\ldots = 2.$

• Working down the rows, the second row is the same as the first with the first term removed. So its sum must be 1. The third is the same as the second with the first term of 1/2 removed, so its sum is 1/2. By the same reasoning, the sum of the fourth row will be 1/4, the fifth row 1/8 and so on.
• So, the row sums are respectively 2, 1, 1/2, 1/4, …. This is the same as the values of the first row with the additional first term of 2. It follows that the sum of the row sums, and therefore the sum of all numbers in the grid is 2+2=4. Again, we can’t add all the numbers in the practice, but we will get closer and closer to the value of 4 by adding more and more squares.
• The total value of the squares inside the red square is 1 + 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/4 = 9/4. The total value outside this region must therefore be 2-9/4= 7/4.
• Putting all this together, the initial value of the coins was 2. After any number of moves, the total value of all coins will always remain 2. But the total value of all squares outside the red square is only 7/4. It must therefore be impossible to remove the three coins from the red square because to do so would require the coins outside of this area to have a value of 2, which is greater than the total value available in the entire region.

I find this argument quite brilliant. My instincts were to try to solve the puzzle using arguments from geometry. I failed. It would never have occurred to me to try to develop a solution based on the properties of numbers.

As I wrote in the original post, this puzzle doesn’t really have any direct relevant to Statistics except in so much as it shows the power and beauty of mathematical proof, which is an essential part of statistical theory. Having said that, the idea of infinite limits is important in Statistics, and I’ll discuss this in a further post. Let me just mention though that summing infinite series as in the solution above is a delicate issue for at least two reasons:

1. Although the sum 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …. has a finite sum of 2, this series 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + …. has no finite sum. The sum grows very slowly, but as I take more and more numbers in the series, the sum grows without any limit. That’s to say, if you give me any number – say 1 million – I can always find enough terms in the series for the sum to be greater than that number.
2. To get the total value of the grid, we first added the rows and then added these row sums across the columns. We could alternatively have first added the columns, and then added these columns sums across the rows and we’d have got the same answer. For this example both these alternatives are valid. But in general this interchange of row and column sums to get the total sum is not valid. Consider, for example, this infinite grid:

The first row sums to 2, after which all other rows sum to zero. So, the sum of the row sums is 2. But looking at the columns, even column sums to zero. So, if we sum the columns and then sum these sums we get 0. This couldn’t possibly happen with finite grids, but infinite grids require a lot more care.

In a follow-up post we’ll consider limits of sums in the context of Statistics.

Finally, I’m grateful to Fabian.Thut@smartodds.co.uk for some follow-up discussion on the original post. In particular, we ended up discussing the following variation on the original puzzles. The rules are exactly the same as before, but the starting configuration of the coins is now as per the following diagram:

In this case, can the puzzle be solved? Does the argument presented for the original problem help in any way?

If you have any thoughts about this, please do write to me. In any case, I’ll write another post with the solution to this version shortly.

# Coincidentally

Here we go again…

Happy birthday to me. And Harry.Hill@smartodds.co.uk  and Rickie.Reynolds@smartodds.co.uk. And willfletcher1111@gmail.com who also used to be in the quant team. What a remarkable coincidence that 3 of us currently in the quant team – together with another quant who has since left – each have our birthday on the 11th November. But as I discussed in a post around this time last year as well as at a previous offsite, there are so many possible combinations of three or four people in the company that could have a shared birthday, that it’s not that very surprising that one combination does. It just happened to be me, Harry, Rickie and Will on 11/11.

And on the subject of coincidences…

You may have heard of an app called what3words. This is a location app for ios or android which divides the entire globe into 3 x 3 metre squares and assigns 3 words to each square. For example, currently sitting at my desk in the Smartodds office, the 3 allocated words are “insert”, “falls”, “opens”. The idea is that in an emergency I can identify and communicate my unique position to the relevant emergency services by means of just these 3 words. Of course, I could do the same thing with my GPS coordinates, but the point is that standard words are easier to read and communicate in a hurry. And there are already a number of instances in which lives have potentially been saved through use of the app.

And the coincidence? Well, I opened the app in my house the other day with this result:

… and, here in a recent Halloween pic with my Grandson, is my Granddaughter…

… the charmingly awesome Poppy!

Footnote: writing this now, I’m reminded that some time ago, as a follow-up to a post  which also discussed coincidences, Richard.Greene@smartodds.co.uk mailed me about an experience he’d recently had. He described it as follows:

I was listening to the radio one morning, and the presenter mentioned “French windows”. I wasn’t sure at the time what they were, and remember amusing myself as to what made them French exactly – perhaps they come with a beret on top etc…anyway, an hour later, I was watching Frasier over my cornflakes and there was a joke/reference to French windows!

Like the shared birthdays, if you tried to calculate the chance of the mentioning of French windows on both the radio and an episode of Frasier within a short time of one another, the probability would be incredibly remote. But again, we experience so many opportunities for coincidences every day, that although the vast majority don’t happen, one or two inevitably do. And they’re the ones we remember and sometimes ascribe to ‘fate’, ‘destiny’, ‘karma’ etc etc. When in fact it’s just the laws of probability playing out in our daily lives.

Anyway, Richard suggested that an idea for a blog post would be collect and collate ‘coincidences’ of the kind I’ve described here – my experience with what3words; Richard’s with French windows. So, if you’ve recently had, or have in the near future, a coincidental experience of some sort, please send it to me and I’ll include it in a future post.