Losing to win.It's a gift to born losers. Researchers have demonstrated that two games of chance, each guaranteed to give a player a predominance pre·dom·i·nance also pre·dom·i·nan·cy n. The state or quality of being predominant; preponderance. Noun 1. predominance - the state of being predominant over others predomination, prepotency of losses in the long term, can add up to a winning outcome if the player alternates randomly between the two games. This striking new result in game theory is now called Parrondo's paradox Parrondo's paradox is a paradox in game theory and is often described as: A losing strategy that wins. It is named after its creator Juan Parrondo, a Spanish physicist. , after its discoverer, Juan M.R. Parrondo, a physicist at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. Gregory P. Harmer and Derek Abbott Derek Abbott (3 May 1960, in South Kensington, London, UK) is a physicist and electronic engineer. He is a Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide, Australia. of the University of Adelaide Its main campus is located on the cultural boulevard of North Terrace in the city-centre alongside prominent institutions such as the Art Gallery of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and the State Library of South Australia. in Australia use a combination of two losing gambling games to illustrate this counterintuitive coun·ter·in·tu·i·tive adj. Contrary to what intuition or common sense would indicate: "Scientists made clear what may at first seem counterintuitive, that the capacity to be pleasant toward a fellow creature is ... phenomenon in the Dec. 23/30, 1999 NATURE. The two games involve tossing toss v. tossed, toss·ing, toss·es v.tr. 1. To throw lightly or casually or with a sudden slight jerk: tossed the shirt on the floor. See Synonyms at throw. biased coins. In the simpler game, the player gambles with a coin that's been loaded to make the probability of winning less than 50 percent. The second, more complicated game requires two biased coins. One of the coins wins slightly more often than it loses, and the other loses much more often than it wins. The game is set up so that even though the winning coin is tossed more often, that is outweighed by the much lower probability of winning with the other coin. Played repeatedly, each game on its own gradually depletes a player's capital. It turns out, however, that randomly switching between the games results in a steady increase in capital. Alternating between the games produces a ratchetlike effect. Imagine an uphill slope with its steepness related to a coin's bias. Winning means moving uphill. In the single-coin game, the slope is smooth, and in the two-coin game, the slope has a sawtooth profile. Going from one game to the other is like switching between smooth and sawtooth profiles. In effect, any winnings that happen to come along are trapped by the switch to the other game before subsequent repetitions of the original game can contribute to the otherwise inevitable decline. "There are actually many ways to construct such gambling scenarios," Harmer and Abbott note. The researchers also suggest that similar strategies may operate in the economic, social, or ecological realms to extract benefits from what look like detrimental det·ri·men·tal adj. Causing damage or harm; injurious. det  ri·men situations.
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