Can you beat Piggy in this simple dice game? Can you figure out Piggy's strategy, and is there a better one?
Edward Wallace based his A Level Statistics Project on The Mean Game. Each picks 2 numbers. The winner is the player who picks a number closest to the mean of all the numbers picked.
Use the computer to model an epidemic. Try out public health policies to control the spread of the epidemic, to minimise the number of sick days and deaths.
When cracking text-based codes, a first step is often to look for repeated strings of characters resulting from structure in the underlying cypher-text. This can give a way in to cracking the code.
Alison and Steve are considering the following coded message:
Alison computes the frequency of each letter, finding these results:
After some fiddling around on a spreadsheet, Steve notices that there are seven repeated strings of 5 letters, highlighted as shown below:
Steve dismisses this as coincidence, saying "I would guess that these repeated 5-letter sequences are consistent with randomly generated text based on these frequencies of letters". Alison is not convinced and thinks that this structure of 5 letter sequences would not likely occur randomly for these frequencies of letters.
Investigate.
Challenge: Crack the code, regardless of who is right!