[HN Gopher] The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly: 21 Seconds
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The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly: 21 Seconds
Author : ksangeelee
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-05-30 21:46 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scatter.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scatter.wordpress.com)
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Neat.
|
| The longest possible game is playing with family that don't like
| or don't know the rules and like to put money on free parking.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's when you sneeze or find some other reason to bump the
| table hard enough to lose the places of all of the pieces.
| "Ooops, I guess we'll have to pick this game up later"
| function_seven wrote:
| Be the banker, embezzle the hell out of the bank, never worry
| about making rent. Eventually you'll be discovered: "Hey!
| You're cheating!"
|
| "Huh? I thought that's what this game was about. Y'all
| started it with that Free Parking nonsense."
| awb wrote:
| Anyone want to roughly calculate the odds of this actually
| happening?
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| 0 in practice, who decides to buy nothing? And even if player
| one declines to buy, player two can buy it via the auction.
| awb wrote:
| Sure for Player 1, but if Player 2 reduces their cash by
| buying properties that still results in a loss. The premise
| is creating so much rent on Boardwalk that player 2 can't
| afford it.
| dorkwood wrote:
| My sister often buys nothing. She has this weird idea that
| certain colors and utilities aren't worth buying. I beat her
| every time with my "buy literally everything" strategy.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The specific sequence of rolls has 5 doubles (which can only
| occur one way) and 4 unequal pairs (which can occur two ways).
| Each double has a 1/36 chance of happening while the unequal
| pairs have a 1/18 chance. So that's 1/36^5 * 1/18^4 =
| 1/6,347,497,291,776 or about 1.5 times ten to the minus
| thirteen.
|
| It's interesting that the last four digits of the denominator
| of the probability of the shortest game of Monopoly are 1776.
| I'm sure that has some kind of cosmic significance.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Nice, thanks
| awb wrote:
| And don't forget that Player 2 most also pick an "advance to
| Boardwalk" card out of a shuffled deck.
| 988747 wrote:
| And the Player 1 has to get "Bank error in your favor,
| Collect $200" in their first turn, otherwise they will lack
| $50 to buy 5 houses in turn 2 (which I assume is
| significant in raising rent for Boardwalk to $1400)
| choeger wrote:
| According to the law of cosmic improbabilities, it just
| _has_ to happen in that Case.
|
| To quote Terry Pratchett:
|
| > Scientists have calculated that the chances of something
| so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
| But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances
| crop up nine times out of ten.
| lysozyme wrote:
| If we say it's nine rolls of two dice, and the probability of
| getting any particular pair of numbers in each roll is 1/36
| (underestimate since we sometimes only care about the sum),
| then getting any specified sequence would be like (1/36)^9,
| around 1e-14. Of course then we'd have to get the gameplay
| right too
| simlevesque wrote:
| The Youtube comment are saying that this requires players to make
| completely irrational moves and I agree
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I also agree but it's still _possible_ in theory
| onychomys wrote:
| The comments of the article are full of people coming up with
| ways to play entirely rationally and still end the game in 8
| moves, they're worth reading.
| CapriciousCptl wrote:
| If you drop some presumptions about the players you can go even
| faster--
|
| Player 1: Roll a 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11 or 12. Don't purchase, so it
| goes to auction. In auction player 2 buys for 100% of their cash.
|
| Player 2: Rolls a 4, lands on income tax. Game over.
| cortesoft wrote:
| You would pay 10% of your wealth for income tax, so you could
| always mortgage your one property and pay the 10% of the
| mortgage value.
| koolba wrote:
| You'd be surprised how few people know about the rule for
| auctioning property that is not purchased. I'm guessing most
| people learned to play without reading the actual rules. It's
| just passed down by copying the actions of your older siblings.
| Cyykratahk wrote:
| Exactly, even this run is using house rules, as the official
| rules state that you are required to own all properties of
| the same colour before building, and also that houses must be
| built evenly on each property.
| juped wrote:
| this isn't true about either the blog post (buys boardwalk
| and park place, purchases houses evenly on this complete
| property group) or the comment above (no houses or hotels
| are involved)
| cortesoft wrote:
| The blog buys both BW and PP, and buys houses evenly.
| Jyaif wrote:
| Well played! And this strategy is actually easy to execute.
|
| The probability for executing this strategy is:
| P(3)+P(5)+P(6)+P(8)+P(9)+P(11)+P(12) * P(4).
|
| Plug in the numbers from
| https://statweb.stanford.edu/~susan/courses/s60/split/node65...
|
| (0.0556+0.1111+0.1389+0.1389+0.1111+0.0556+0.278)*0.0833 =
| 0.07407036
|
| So 7.4%.
| Someone wrote:
| You don't even need that second roll. If, in that auction, a
| player bids more than the cash they have, they go bankrupt
| immediately (https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/monins.pdf
| doesn't say such bids are disallowed, and does say "The buyer
| pays the Bank the amount of the bid in cash" and "You are
| declared bankrupt if you owe more than you can pay either to
| another player or to the Bank.")
|
| This can happen after the first player rolled a double, so the
| first player's turn doesn't even have to be over for a player
| to go bankrupt.
| cryptoz wrote:
| My favorite monopoly games are those where the players have
| played together before, and agree on a set of custom rules to the
| game in advance, and are fast-paced. I remember having rules
| added like loans and interest, and effectively unlimited freedom
| to make deals with players. Deals logged on paper, loan interest
| measured in turns and percentages, so much...fun. Actual fun
| though.
|
| A game like this can even go fast paced where the next player is
| making their turn while you're still interacting with the bank
| from your turn, while someone else is calculating interest.
|
| Doesn't sound fun typing it out but it was a blast.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| I'd be interested to see / write an algorithm for this
| jaredsohn wrote:
| [2010]
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