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5 Starters and Plenaries

Snakes and Ladders is an ancient Indian board game that was used to teach religious concepts. It is played on a board with numbered squares connected by ladders and snakes. Using computational modeling and Markov chains, various properties of the game can be analyzed, such as the probability of landing on different squares, the expected number of rolls to complete the game, and how results change with different board configurations.

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Rebecca
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54 views1 page

5 Starters and Plenaries

Snakes and Ladders is an ancient Indian board game that was used to teach religious concepts. It is played on a board with numbered squares connected by ladders and snakes. Using computational modeling and Markov chains, various properties of the game can be analyzed, such as the probability of landing on different squares, the expected number of rolls to complete the game, and how results change with different board configurations.

Uploaded by

Rebecca
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Let’s play Snakes and Ladders!

Snakes and Ladders is a board game originated in ancient India. It is not entirely known when or who
invented it. According to some historians, the game was used to teach children about the religion. The
good squares allow a player to ascend higher in the league of life whereas evil will reduce a player back
through reincarnation to lower tiers of life. Presumably the last square, represents Nirvana.
This game is played between two or more players on a board having numbered, gridded squares. The
board contains a number of snakes and ladders connecting two specific squares on the grid. The aim of
the game is to navigate one’s piece along the board, from the first square to the last one according to die
rolls, helped or hindered by ladders and snakes, respectively.
In this project we aim at creating our own ”Snakes and Ladders” game and analyse it both computa-
tionally and mathematically!
Using a Monte Carlo algorithm with the help of a computer we can simulate hundreds of games and
count the frequencies of each square in order to find out which squares have higher or less probability.
We can also estimate the expected number of die rolls needed to complete a game. We can also show
that this is probably not a fair game whenever there are two or more players. Why do you think it is
so? How could one rule out this unfairness?
In order to study the game mathematically, we will use basic theory on Markov chains. A Markov
chain is a stochastic process Xn , indexed by a natural number n ≥ 0 satisfying the following property:
P (Xn = xn |Xn−1 = xn−1 , . . . , X0 = x0 ) = P (Xn = xn |Xn−1 = xn−1 ),
for any given positions x0 , . . . , xn in the state space of X, in our case, squares. In our setting, Xn will
denote the position of our piece on the board after n rolls. The above identity tells us that the future
position Xn on the board, depends exclusively on Xn−1 , and not on how we arrived at Xn−1 . Thus, one
says that X = {Xn }n≥0 is Markovian, or in simple words, X has no memory. Markov chains can be
represented by matrices where each entry corresponds to a probability of transitioning from one square to
another, hence the sum of columns adds up to 1. With some elementary linear algebra we can compute
the n-step transition probabilities, the so-called limiting (or stable, or invariant) distribution and the
exact expected number of rolls needed for completing the game.
One can also test the algorithm, by adding snakes or ladders and see how results change. Adding snakes
will most likely increase the expected total length of the game, but is it always the case? Paradoxically,
adding snakes may make the game shorter, and you may take some time to think why!

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