Reversals of chance in paradoxical games

✍ Scribed by P. Amengual; P. Meurs; B. Cleuren; R. Toral

• Book ID: 103880603
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 614 KB
• Volume: 371
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0378-4371
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2006.03.038

✦ Synopsis

We present two collective games with new paradoxical features when they are combined. Besides reproducing the socalled Parrondo effect, where a winning game is obtained from the alternation of two fair games, there also exists a current inversion when varying the mixing probability between the games. We show that this is a new effect insofar one of the games is an unbiased random walk without internal structure. We present a detailed study by means of a discrete-time Markov chain analysis, obtaining analytical expressions for the stationary probabilities for a finite number of players. We also provide qualitative insight into this current inversion effect.