Probability Puzzles in R

Course Description

Do you want to take your probability skills to the next level? This course will help get you there, using problem-based learning with probability puzzles as the framework. As you are guided through their solutions, you will gain coding tools and general strategies for solving probability problems that you might encounter in many other situations. Organized by theme, the course begins with classic problems like the Birthday Problem and Monty Hall, and ends with puzzles that involve poker like Texas Hold’em and the World Series of Poker!

What You’ll Learn

Introduction and Classic Puzzles

This chapter will introduce some basic principles that will be used throughout the course, such as writing loops and functions. Then, we dive into a couple of classic problems: the Birthday Problem, and Monty Hall.

Inspired from the Web

The puzzles in this chapter were inspired by ideas encountered on the internet. In order to solve them, you will learn to combine tools such as nested for loops, and the functions round, identical, and sapply.

Games with Dice

In this chapter, we explore games in which dice are rolled, including Yahtzee, Settlers of Catan, and Craps. You will learn tools such as using built-in R functions to calculate combinatorics, and using functions such as replicate and the %in% operator.

Poker

This chapter explores questions in poker, including the most often televised version of Texas Hold’em. We will learn to code for win probabilities with any given number of outs, and also explore a more theoretical model of poker known as the von Neumann model. We will learn to use functions such as Reduce, runif, and ifelse.