Tuesday, October 25, 2011

More Gaming Math Problems Coming Soon!

As you probably have noticed, I haven't posted up many Gaming Math problems in a while though. However, that will soon change. Today at board game night I learned about a new big thing in board game related commerce called "Math Trades." These "Math Trades" are generally run on the web site Board Game Geek and the way they work is everyone posts what games they want and what games they want to trade. Then a computer program uses a mathematical algorithm to figure out how to maximize the number of beneficial trades, which often involves "trade circles" - i.e. if person A has a game that person B wants, person B has a game that person C wants, and person C has a game that person A wants, they can they can trade in a circle. Obviously there are a lot of interesting math problems in here, but I haven't posted any up today because I will have to think about the problem some more in order to figure out what the right way to formulate the problem is. (Of course, I could just read the web site for the software that explains how it works, but where's the fun in that?)

3 comments:

Nanette Goodman said...

Is this an opportunity for you to get rid of some of the games in your closet at home that you no longer want?

Alexander Mont said...

I will have to go look. It all depends on if the games I have are games that other people in the Math Trades want. Also we will need to make sure we only try to trade away games that have all the pieces.

Dan Mont said...

Just another example of how amazing our access is to information now. If I put you in a time capsule back to when I was your age, you would be stunned out how hard it would be to find information and connect with people.