Can maths help you win at games?

In this AfterMaths Summer Special, Jon and Becky explore the line between luck and strategy — and whether understanding the maths behind a game can actually give you an advantage.

They take in Rock Paper Scissors, Noughts & Crosses, chess, a deceptively simple counting game, the chessboard-and-rice problem, expected value, roulette and the mathematics hiding inside Monopoly.

Along the way: why some apparently random games aren’t quite random, why exponential growth gets ridiculous remarkably quickly, why the house tends to win at casinos, and how a little probability might improve your chances during family game night.

Maths can’t guarantee that you’ll win every game.

But it might make people considerably less keen to play Monopoly with you.

Can maths really predict the future?

We can predict the return of a comet decades in advance, but tomorrow's weather can still catch us completely by surprise. In this AfterMaths Summer Special, Jon and Becky explore why some futures are easier to calculate than others.

From probability, forecasts and projections to Halley’s Comet, the phantom planet Vulcan and Edward Lorenz's discovery of chaos theory, they ask how much mathematics can genuinely tell us about what happens next.

There's also the butterfly effect, an unexpectedly important rounding error, the difference between chaos and randomness — and the small problem that human beings refuse to behave like nice, predictable mathematical models.

Especially children.

So, can maths predict the future?

Sort of. Which is perhaps the most mathematically appropriate answer possible.

Podcast Show Notes

What makes a route the best route? The shortest distance? The quickest journey? The cheapest option? Or simply whichever one Google tells you to take?

In this AfterMaths Summer Special, Jon and Becky explore the maths of getting away — from Google Maps and traffic predictions to queues, theme parks and an 18th-century puzzle that helped create an entirely new area of mathematics.

Along the way, they discuss the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, Euler's ingenious solution and what it can teach us about problem solving: representing problems, working systematically, spotting patterns, simplifying and knowing when there might not actually be a solution at all.

Plus: why the other supermarket queue is always faster, whether you should ever switch queues, 99 smartphones causing a fake traffic jam in Berlin, and the deeply troubling emergence of people forming orderly queues at pub bars.

It's maths. It's holidays. It's considerably more Euler than your average trip to Orlando.