TWO idiots want to fight a duel but they have only one gun (a six-shooter)
and one bullet. So they take turns to spin the cylinder at random and then fire.
It pays to go first: idiot number one has a 6/11 chance of surviving, marginally
better than evens. But what if the second idiot gets two shots, then the first
gets three, and so on—stopping when one kills the other, of course? Does
it still pay to go first?
The best part of Paul Nahin’s Duelling Idiots and Other Probability
Puzzles(Princeton, £15.95, ISBN 0691009791) features a selection of…
