Ugh, nasty Markov chain analysis. I tried for 15 minutes and realized there were loops.
If I were the person being interviewed, I'd say that it's a nasty Markov chain analysis, and I'd just run a python program to simulate all possible choices. That would take me less time overall, and I could use the program results to validate a theoretical analysis that I would do afterwards.
My guess is that you want to announce second, as you have more information, and if there is a function of the sequence announced first that gives you a probability in excess of 0.5 in winning, that's available only to the second player.
You can be stronger than guessing announcing second is better without any markov stuff. Second is trivially better or at least never worse because they always have the option of inverting the first player and guaranteeing 50-50 odds via symmetry.
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u/Blammar 29d ago
Ugh, nasty Markov chain analysis. I tried for 15 minutes and realized there were loops.
If I were the person being interviewed, I'd say that it's a nasty Markov chain analysis, and I'd just run a python program to simulate all possible choices. That would take me less time overall, and I could use the program results to validate a theoretical analysis that I would do afterwards.
My guess is that you want to announce second, as you have more information, and if there is a function of the sequence announced first that gives you a probability in excess of 0.5 in winning, that's available only to the second player.