After hearing about what it’s like to be a statistician, we were introduced to Alex Cloud’s research project about luck and skill in games. His goal was to mathematize the effects of luck vs skill in games, explaining that in order for a game to be considered legal skill must have a larger impact than chance. He simplified this concept for us by introducing a game called randochess(p). In the game p is a number between 0 and 1 resulting in a p percent chance to have the outcome of the game be determined by a coin toss and a 1 – p percent chance to have the game be determined by a game of pure skill, in this example chess.
This scenario revealed perspectives of how skillful a game is by having us determine whether the game became less skillful as p approached 1 or if it stayed the same. The two reasonings were, the game became less skillful because more of it relied on chance or the game was the same because after many iterations the more skilled player would win more often resulting in the same ordering of players. His presentation proved to be extremely engaging this afternoon.