, Columnist
Kominers’s Conundrums: Pick a Number, Any Number at All
This game has been played in newspapers and game theory classrooms all around the world. Now it’s your turn.
It sounds easy, but it is deceptively subtle.
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This is the 64th edition of Conundrums — a rare power of 2! We won’t see another of those for more than a year. And as is customary for the column, we’re celebrating this mathematically interesting edition with a math game.
The format is simple: Everyone submits a number between 0 and 64,000 (inclusive — you can submit 0 or 64,000 if you want). We’re going to take all of those numbers and compute their average. Your goal is for the number you submitted to be the closest to four-sixths of that average.