A Day in the Life
Supergeek noticed something wrong and I demonstrated that the author was lazy and hadn't actually done his math; the numbers didn't add up and I said so. "Jesus Christ, Canine! Who the fuck adds up scores in a fucking Archie comic?" my fellow 9-year-old incarceree screamed. My nickname for the rest of August was Columbo.
But I was intrigued. Could there be a way to make the scoring work so that Archie could win even though he always came in second place? It took me a few tries but I figured out how it might work.
In my university prob/stat course we had to write programs in some glub-awful language like MAPLE. The Archie conundrum was still in my head and so I used it as the basis of a complex assignment. It turns out that theoretically it's quite probable that a second-placer will win overall as long as he's consistent and there are enough other actors (probabilty becomes >50% at 6 or 7 actors).
And now it's happened to me in real life. An evening of bowling on the $MegaCorp dime. We came in second place in each of the three full games played. But while some other team would soundly trounce us in one round, they'd play poorly in another. We played consistently and won.
The best thing of the night wasn't winning the damned "team-building" event -- like I could give a rat's ass about that. It wasn't even the free food (we had to pay for our own beer). It's that my Archie conundrum which has followed me for three decades or so has finally put to bed.
Me. First place in bowling. Insanity, I tell ya.
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