Chances Are: Adventures in Probability
by Michael Kaplan, Ellen Kaplan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ellen Kaplan, Michael KaplanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-02-27
ISBN: 0143038346
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Chances Are: Adventures in Probability
Book Review: history, philosophy and interesting stories rolled into one book on chance
Summary: 5 Stars
I am not familiar with the authors or their background in mathematics and statistics but I do think they have put together a very interesting and historically accurate story about probability it origins and its paradoxes and the famous people who developed the theory. I have read Stigler and Hald and their wonderful accounts of the history of statistics but there are stories in hear that I have never heard before. I hope they are all true. They all seem very plausible to me. For example the Monte Carlo method whose history I researched when I wrote a chapter on it for a US Army Compendium on Risk Analysis is covered with a story about Stan Ulam that I did not know. Ulam was one of the great mathematicians/probabilists brought to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project during WWII. At that time John von Neumann was developing one of the first digital computers. In my research I trace the Monte Carlo method back to the Buffon needle problem in the 1700s. But that was a physical experiment with a probability model associated with it. Also they certainly did not call in Monte Carlo back then.
According to the Kaplan's, Ulam was convalescing from an illness in 1946 and decided to play games of solitaire. It got him to thinking about the odds of "playing out" or winning a solitaire game. For a long time he tried to compute the result but the combinatorics was too complicated. Eventually, he abandoned that approach and thought about having a computer shuffle the deck of cards and play the game over and over again. When he brought this idea to the attention of von Neumann, von Neumann coined the term Monte Carlo method for such computer simulations.
I found this to be a very nice and plausible story. I am a little puzzled because although there can be arrangements of the deck that make winning very easy and other arrangements that make winning impossible, the player has to use a strategy when playing out a hand. Not every move is automatic and when there are two or more seemingly good choices the deck could be set up in a way that one choice would lead to a guaranteed lose while another could lead to win. So there is an element of skill involved in solitaire making the long run success probablity vary depending on the skill of the player. However, for a computer it may be possible to work out an optimal strategy that could be played if the whole deck were uncovered in the beginning. Then we could have a unique solution. So if the story is true there is a hidden assumption that the Kapln's neglected to discuss with us. In spite of the very minor flaw I thought the book was delightful and outstanding and therefore deserving of five stars!!
Summary of Chances Are: Adventures in Probability
A compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting humanity?s struggle against randomnessOur lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling?reluctantly?for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man?s millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable?to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. In these pages, we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract formulations of probability, as well as the intrepid visionaries who recognized their practical applications?from gamblers to military strategists to meteorologists to medical researchers, from blackjack to our own mortality.
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