Alice and Bob card game – a different version

card-gamesprobability

Alice chooses with uniform distribution two real numbers between 0 and 100 and write them down, each on a card. Then, Alice decides which card Bob will see. Bob looks at the card and then decides which of the cards he wants. If he get the higher number he wins, otherwise he loses.

As not as the version in the question
Alice and Bob card game, here Alice can play a strategy such that Bob won't be able to guarantee winning strictly more than half the time. The question is how Alice can do that.

I tried to reflect the strategy that Bob uses in the original question, for example, decide that if both numbers are greater than 50, Bob will get the lower number to see, etc. In all these variation, the original strategy of Bob still guarantees to win strictly more than half the time. Any other ideas?

Best Answer

Alice can prevent Bob having better than a $50\%$ chance of winning by showing him the value closest to $50$. This works even if Bob knows her strategy.

Say Alice shows Bob $x<50$. Now Bob knows that the other card is in $(0,x)$ or $(100-x,100)$. These cases have equal probability, and he needs to make different choices in each case, so whatever he does will be wrong half the time.

Related Question