While there are a few intelligent, well-meaning and worth-reading contributors at some forums the lunatics inevitably seem to destroy the debate with their spamming of path to ruin systems.

Amid the current incessant promotion of loss chasing, negative expectation insanity is Parrondo's Paradox.

So here is my personally conceived demonstration of why it is a sham.

Imagine a class of games where you have to traverse a disparate region.

Game A: Use a bicycle

Game B: Use a canoe

Unfortunately the region is so bad that you will inevitably bog down using just one conveyance. So neither game can be won.

But if you wave a wand to magically randomly transform the vehicle into EITHER a bicycle or canoe you will eventually win.

This is the flaw in Parrondo's Paradox.

You are NOT combining 2 negative Games A and B to produce a positive Game.

You are actually combining 3 games A, B and M - where M is the magic wand capable of morphing between A and B.

M is clearly a positive game and that contradicts the claim of turning negatives into positives.

There is no magic wand in racing.

There is winning and losing, there is no third element except breaking even, but that adds no element to the end result.

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If M could only talk. The tales it would tell.

While we wait for the Parrondo Proponents to rear their delusional heads, you might find this link (spotted elsewhere) interesting:

http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/...er/games/ma.htm

Presumably it is trying to describe the underlying principles of the paradox.

I've been working through it and it has more than its fair share of holes. Unfortunate since formulae with typos defeat the purpose.

But you don't need to do too much work to note the obvious flaw in the hoax.

Game B is supposed to be negative. And it plays out according to its own current capital.

But the moment you combine it with Game A you alter Game B and its probabilities. Because you introduce random external variations to its capital thus altering the way it plays out.

Yet the author has no qualms about squandering taxpayers' money writing papers with deceptive titles like:

"Losing strategies can win by Parrondo's paradox"

What about the theory 'Ockham's Razor' [for those that don't know what that is, goggle it] . could that be applied to horse Racing in some way ?

Nearly everybody knows the principle but probably not by the mathematical name Occam's Razor.

In essence it is "when there are a number of different correct solutions to a problem choose the simplest".

The best racing applications that I can come up with right now are things like barrier tables.

Nearly every public analysis I've seen (including Don Scott) produces complicated tables which turn out to be wrong. That's because they only count from one side.

Barrier 6 might sometimes be an inner gate, and at other times the outer.

If instead you counted from the edges using -1, -2, -3 for the widest, 2nd widest etc. then you would spot important patterns that the others miss.

In particular you might spot cases where the widest gate is actually an advantage, and sometimes wide gates in general.

That info would simply be buried in the original more complicated tables.

The same technique also bears fruit for order of favouritism. The 6th favourite might be well in the money or actually the bolter.


Occam's Razor is actually used in real life for pattern recognition as illustrated here:


http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~soss/cs644...attern-rec.html

It's quite simple jfc, they didn't account for the number of starters in a race.

But with 6 barriers over 2000m does anyone seriously think barrier 1 is any better than barrier 6?

The further the distance, the less the barrier impact.
The shorter the distance the more the speed impact.

Barrier positions are extremely overrated and exaggerated.

It's what happens or what a horse can do in the straight that matters, the early part is up to the jockey, not the barrier.

Barriers have very little to do with winning chances in fact.

Just my findings from a research I did two years ago.

However, here is an instance of the "Paradox".....
(negative barrier - negative chance = overlay)
Horses in "unfavoured" barriers mean a higher average price, therefore profit can be made, as horses overcome this obstacle more often than the price they are.

Horses in public favoured barriers are given too much of a discount by the public, so are great lay opportunities.

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 413,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/01/2025
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

Not sure that I agree with your sentiments jfc. I personally know of one person who claims to have had some success with Parrondo's Paradox & know of another who did a fair bit of work on the issue, claiming that used correctly it was possible to turn two negatives into positive.

There is a certain forum where what has been written by both can be located but I dare say if I mentioned that forum here the thought police would quickely have it removed. Pity about that, as this forum has lost a lot due to those damned thought police, but nevertheless, it is Propun's loss not mine.

But if you know who Chiron or Peter Jamieson are then perhaps you can work out which forum it is.

La Mer,

I'm not sure if you've actually browsed the Markov chain link I posted, but I've now actually figured how to do the key calculations with a spreadsheet. Too much effort to post here, but if someone mathematically inclined genuinely wants to see it I'll try to eventually oblige.

Anyway it's more obvious than ever to me where the hoax is - Game B cannot be combined without irreperably altering its essence.

But it is inconceivable that the Parrondo model could be applied to racing.

Essentially it involves a Game B - a stair climb - where every (say) 3rd step is very unlucky.

But in racing if you know that certain races are very unlucky why don't you just skip them!

So I suspect your associate is deluding himself.

I'm sure I've vented how underwhelming I find arguments involving negative games and/or loss chasing.

But are other plans based on the notion that racing is different to roulette. That is true - there are definite long runs which defy conventional statistics. The trouble is you only find out about them AFTERWARDS. I don't know of anyone who succeeds in predicting runs early on. So these plans appear extremely suspect.

The method I use is to try and withstand even the worst possible run and always keep hanging in. Which means at some point I am forced to reduce. But a horrendous run usually wipes out a lot of competitors so if I survive I end up picking up far more juicy collects.

Having worked extensively in HK and being able to compile many studies of the racing product, one such study was on horses working out on their own or in pairs (time based) in the vast majority of cases these horses INHERENTLY have a "normal" probability distribution (which one would expect or be very likely) introduce these "normal" horses to real competition (Class Ladder) and he has a "Different" distribution, the difference in those two distributions is almost entirely due to the physical artifacts of the Class Ladder and some other racing conditions , and NOT due to the talent component of the Horse.

Further studies confirmed that Barriers / Racing style produced a very distinct range of Distributions .... so in the wash up of all this mumbo jumbo is that Barrier / Racing styles might not produce absolute differences but they do hold the key in being able to provide a very good "performance" distribution