Two issues surrounding parrondo’s paradox

Abstract

In the original version of Parrondo’s paradox, two losing sequences of games of chance are combined to form a winning sequence. The games in the first sequence depend on a single parameter p, while those in the second depend on two parameters p1 and p2. The paradox is said to occur because there exist choices of p, p1 and p2 such that the individual sequences of games are losing but a sequence constructed by choosing randomly between the games at each step is winning. At first sight, such behavior seems surprising. However, we contend in this paper that it should not be seen as surprising. On the contrary, we showthat such behaviour is typical in situations in which we randomly create a sequ..