Puzzler: Ultimate Frisbee- call it!

Posted by Doug Hull, October 27, 2009

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I play a fair amount of Ultimate Frisbee® between lunch across the street at Cognex and playing with Boston Ultimate Disk Alliance. Games of Ultimate start with the two teams flipping two Frisbees in the air and calling “Same or different” My team was trying to figure out which is the most likely outcome. I made a convincing argument, but I am curious what kind of persuasive MATLAB-based ‘proofs’ can be made. I am offering a MATLAB t-shirt to the most persuasive entry. Use published MATLAB files, GUI’s, MATLAB script or function, whatever you think will be most convincing. Contest ends this time next week.

Assumptions: The Frisbees (or coins) are either ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. The coins may or may not be ‘fair’ (i.e. they might be heads 80% of the time!), however the odds of heads versus tails for the two coins is the same for both coins. Send entries to hull@MathWorks.com (no .rar files please!) (Here is the result of this now closed contest) Frisbee® is a Registered Trademark of © 2004 Wham-o Inc. All Rights Reserved.