So, what is your money on? Given an uncertain situation, what are
you counting on? This way of looking at things can prove salutory.Waiting
for an occurence or hoping to avoid something are not symmetrical.
Let's look at the purest betting situation. one has a deck of playing cards,
and one flips card in a sequence. On any one flip, the odds are
fifty:fifty for showing a black card. But what about flipping a second time after
a black (even having returned black to the deck). The purest will claim
that the odds are ever fifty/fifty on black. Quite true; but the odds on flipping
two black in a row are different. They are actually at 25:75 !! Depending on
whether one wants to see a black show, or whether one wants to avoid seeing a red,
the betting person is facing different odds. And it's purely mathematical; getting that
first black was not a sure thing, any more than the second one. One multiplies the
positive odds of the two events to get the negative.
There are many possible applications to this, but the bottom line is the same.
Repeating risky behaviour sets one up for a misstep. One's money is on a sequence...
* * *
Here is where I fess up about the imperfection of my code on the last
part of the breakout assignment, which I conveniently coded
on Breakout7. There remains the possibility that the Key icon - although taken out of
play - could re-appear and erase one's possibility of hitting the Keybrick.
Indeed, for the code as is, loosing a life would let it re-appear in the
subsequent cycle. This can be fixed with the 'if health == 3' condition.
But it might also re-appear during the same life if one is not quick to hit
the keybrick. Annoying, if anyone has played this code. Try as I could,
appear after 10, set timer at -10 at the end, try for timer is false (an exception).
There was, to my mind, little to be done.
Marching on, I later realized that the next game in the course - Match 3 -
will center on timer problems, and timers on timers etc. Promising...
I need to get to it.
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