Yup. Click-baity headline. I admit it. 🙂
Fun fact: Penn Holderness and I have something in common. We were both mathletes in high school. The Illinois Math competition was lots of fun. I competed in everything except calculator team. More details about that in another post… I’ll just say here that I’m happy to see the contest going on again after COVID.
But the headline: how Penn used probability to help he and his wife Kim (aka the Holderness Family) win the top prize:
https://theholdernessfamily.com/the-math-of-the-amazing-race/
I’ll have to admit that the first item Penn mentions in his analysis could have easily gone the other way…but they ended up making the correct decision. The plan he lays lays out is a simple, easy to follow plan that anyone with a tiny bit of probability knowledge could easily do themselves. That said, it was still possible for them to have to go through all of the permutations. But Penn’s story proves the Seneca quotation: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”