## Should the grizzly eat the salmon?

This Riddler puzzle concerns a random process and sequential decision-making.

A grizzly bear stands in the shallows of a river during salmon spawning season. Precisely once every hour, a fish swims within its reach. The bear can either catch the fish and eat it, or let it swim past to safety. This grizzly is, as many grizzlies are, persnickety. It’ll only eat fish that are at least as big as every fish it ate before.

Each fish weighs some amount, randomly and uniformly distributed between 0 and 1 kilogram. (Each fish’s weight is independent of the others, and the skilled bear can tell how much each weighs just by looking at it.) The bear wants to maximize its intake of salmon, as measured in kilograms. Suppose the bear’s fishing expedition is two hours long. Under what circumstances should it eat the first fish within its reach? What if the expedition is three hours long?

Here is my solution:
[Show Solution]

## Stop the alien invasion!

Today’s puzzle is from The Riddler, and has to do with spherical geometry.

A guardian constantly patrols a spherical planet, protecting it from alien invaders that threaten its very existence. One fateful day, the sirens blare: A pair of hostile aliens have landed at two random locations on the surface of the planet. Each has one piece of a weapon that, if combined with the other piece, will destroy the planet instantly. The two aliens race to meet each other at their midpoint on the surface to assemble the weapon. The guardian, who begins at another random location on the surface, detects the landing positions of both intruders. If she reaches them before they meet, she can stop the attack.

The aliens move at the same speed as one another. What is the probability that the guardian saves the planet if her linear speed is 20 times that of the aliens’?

Here is my solution for the case of interest, where the guardian is faster than the intruders.
[Show Solution]

Here is a partial solution for the more complicated case where the guardian is slower than the intruders.
[Show Solution]

## Random walk with endpoints

The Riddler post for today is about a bar game where you flip a coin and move forward or backward depending on the result. Here is the problem:

Consider a hot new bar game. It’s played with a coin, between you and a friend, on a number line stretching from negative infinity to positive infinity. (It’s a very, very long bar.) You are assigned a winning number, the negative integer -X, and your friend is assigned his own winning number, a positive integer, +Y. A marker is placed at zero on the number line. Then the coin is repeatedly flipped. Every time the coin lands heads, the marker is moved one integer in a positive direction. Every time the coin lands tails, the marker moves one integer in a negative direction. You win if the coin reaches -X first, while your friend wins if the coin reaches +Y first. (Winner keeps the coin.)

How long can you expect to sit, flipping a coin, at the bar? Put another way, what is the expected number of coin flips in a complete game?

Here is my solution:
[Show Solution]

and here is a much slicker solution, courtesy of Daniel Ross:
[Show Solution]

## How to beat Roger Federer at Wimbledon

This Riddler problem is about the game of tennis!

Your wish has been granted, and you get to play tennis against Roger Federer in his prime in the Wimbledon final. You have only a 1 percent chance to win each point, but Roger, sporting gentleman that he is, offers to let you name any score and begin the match at that point. (So, if you’ve entertained a fantasy of storming back after being down three match points in the fifth set, now’s the time to live it.) What score can you name that gives you the best chance to win, and what is your chance of winning the title?

A rough (and approximate) solution:
[Show Solution]

A more detailed (and exact) solution:
[Show Solution]

## What if robots cut your pizza?

This Riddler puzzle is about random chords of a circle and the regions they describe.

At RoboPizza™, pies are cut by robots. When making each cut, a robot will randomly (and independently) pick two points on a pizza’s circumference, and then cut along the chord connecting them. If you order a pizza and specify that you want the robot to make exactly three cuts, what is the expected number of pieces your pie will have?

Here is a simple solution, which was pointed out to me in a comment to my original post.
[Show Solution]

The following solution is a bit more complicated, and computes the entire distribution rather than just its expected value.
[Show Solution]

If you’ve already read the solution above and you’re interested in the distribution of pieces for the general case, read on!
[Show Solution]

## Baseball division champs

Today’s post is a Riddler problem about baseball, and it goes like this:

Assume you have a sport (let’s call it “baseball”) in which each team plays 162 games in a season. Assume you have a division of five teams (call it the “AL East”) where each team is of exact equal ability. Specifically, each team has a 50 percent chance of winning each game. What is the expected value of the number of wins for the team that finishes in first place?

The problem statement is a bit vague, so we must make some assumptions in order to solve the problem. Our first solution assumes that the win-loss records of the teams are mutually independent.
[Show Solution]

This next solution explains how to tackle the more realistic case where the games are not played independently, and explains why the independence assumption is a good one for the AL East.
[Show Solution]

## Monsters’ gems

Once again, The Riddler does not disappoint! This puzzle is about slaying monsters and collecting gems.

A video game requires you to slay monsters to collect gems. Every time you slay a monster, it drops one of three types of gems: a common gem, an uncommon gem or a rare gem. The probabilities of these gems being dropped are in the ratio of 3:2:1 — three common gems for every two uncommon gems for every one rare gem, on average. If you slay monsters until you have at least one of each of the three types of gems, how many of the most common gems will you end up with, on average?

Here is my solution:
[Show Solution]

A more brute-force approach:
[Show Solution]

Yet another solution approach with very nice write-up can be found on Andrew Mascioli’s blog

## Elevator button puzzle

This problem was originally posted on the Riddler blog. Here it goes:

In a building’s lobby, some number (N) of people get on an elevator that goes to some number (M) of floors. There may be more people than floors, or more floors than people. Each person is equally likely to choose any floor, independently of one another. When a floor button is pushed, it will light up.

What is the expected number of lit buttons when the elevator begins its ascent?

My solution:
[Show Solution]

A much more elegant solution, courtesy of Ross Boczar
[Show Solution]