So my brother showed me up this year by making his own Chanukah card. The only thing I’m creative at is making up riddles, so here’s your end-of-Chanukah treat (true story too!):
My grad student friends and I sat down to play some driedel on the second night of Chanukah (the non-Jew wanted to learn how to play). The host didn’t have any dreidels, but thankfully I had a cheap one that I bought at Wegmann’s just before the holiday. As we began playing, we soon noticed a strange occurance: the pot was only growing in size. Of the four sides of the driedel, only Nun and Shin were landing. In fact, the dreidel landed on these two sides 24 times in a row (!!!) before we switched dreidels.
My question is: What is that chance of a fair dreidel landing on only two of its sides for the first 24 spins? I’ve worked out the calculation (it’s not that hard — plus, getting within an order of magntiude is fairly trivial).
Maybe I should give this problem to my game theory undergrads…if only I were precepting statistics instead, then I actually might.