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cooperative learning game

guessing game

zero-sum game solver

If your browser supports Java, the form below has two buttons with numbers, plus a reset button. If it doesn't you should exit. The computer will try to guess which of the buttons with numbers you will push. The number is the probability with which it thinks you will push that button and the score received by the computer if you do. The computer tracks its average score (1.0 is perfect, 0.0 means it guessed wrong all the time), and the number of trials. If you want to start over, push the reset button.

Obviously it is easy to force the computer down to a score of 0.5: just flip a coin to determine the choice of button. Or you could just always choose the button with the smallest number. You will discover if you do this for a reasonable number of trials, the computer still gets close to 0.5. In fact, you will discover that in a reasonable number of trials, no matter what you do you can't force the computer much below 0.5. This isn't terribly interesting or challenging. The challenge is to feed the computer some pattern recognizable to you, and still force the computer down to around 0.5.

If you are interested in the theory that this program is based on, click here. If you are interested in the source code, click here.