c4countdown

I got the same as you for numbers 101, 102, 103. Beyond that, I hadn't really bothered reasoning anything out but can't see anything wrong with what you've written. I think it's interesting that once you increase the number of pirates enough you get completely different behaviour (the gap between su...

10: 0-0-0-2-2-2-2-1-0-91 Any four from the first seven pirates to get two coins. Am I any closer? I agree completely with this answer :) Wahey, at last! At first, I thought Jon's rules led to a needlessly complicated solution (I'm not just bitter because I arsed it up three times. No siree), but ac...

Gevin, I think you are right. For N=6 and beyond the allocation is not uniquely determined, so you have to offer the pirates a situation in which their expected return in the current round is higher than their expected return in the next one. A bare minimum would be to ensure that the number of coin...

This isn't quite true for the parameters I've given - each pirate will happily watch others walk the plank provided it doesn't reduce their share. Therefore #2 & #3 know they will die if it gets as far as pirate #3 suggesting, so will happily accept a 0-0-0-100 split offered by pirate 4 (ie pir...

It gets more complicated when you try to work out the odds of the word SRETNACED coming out in that order on the show because you have to factor in the tile distributions. Also, many contestants choose their letters in blocks of vowels and consonants, making it unlikely that anything sensible is go...

Well, whilst I was having dinner I realised that there was an error in my reasoning that I have now (hopefully) corrected. My new conclusion is that pirate 10 takes home 95 coins, pirate 9 gets nothing, and that 5 of pirates 1-8 get one coin each (it doesn't matter which 5). Also, none of the pirate...

Will do in half an hour or so David, after I've had my dinner (one of the nice things about this forum is that I don't feel guilty about emailing posts like this to hundreds of people!)

Ten pirates find a treasure chest containing 100 gold coins. After squabbling for some time, they agree on the following process to decide how to divvy up the booty: The pirates are ranked in order, from 1 (highest) to 10 (lowest). The lowest-ranked pirate (10) will offer up a division, for example...

Hi everyone, the new forum looks really nice. I was in series 54, where I lost to Conor in the semis, managing to match him on the words only to make a complete arse of the numbers. I also lost in the semis of the last CofC, this time being pipped by Mark Tournoff thanks to his brilliance on the con...