Tag Archives: simulation

SET Card Game Variation – Complementary Pairs

I recently got an e-mail from Michael Sherman, a teacher in New York. He had developed a variation of the card game Set called Complementary Pairs. This is how he described it:

“We have Set competitions at the school where I teach, both as individual time trials and as head-to-head matches. When many students at my school became capable of finding sets very quickly, I developed what I called C.P. Set (Complementary Pairs) to slow them down a bit and reduce the number of simultaneous calls in the head-to-head matches.  The idea is to find two pairs of cards that both require the same 3rd card to complete a Set. The completing card does not need to be on the board; only the four cards forming the complementary pairs are picked up.” Continue reading

10 million SET games simulated using “Random among ‘most similar’ Sets”

The tabulated  simulation results.

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10 million SET games simulated using “Random among available Sets”

The tabulated  simulation results.

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10 million SET games simulated using “First found Set”

The tabulated  simulation results.

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SET® Probabilities Revisited

In Peter Norvig’s interesting post The Odds of Finding a Set in The Card Game SET, he concludes that the odds against there being no set in 12 cards, during a game, is 16:1. This is an average value, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

A more detailed analysis shows that the odds when playing a game of SET start off at 30:1 for the first round. Then they quickly fall, and after about the 4:th round they are 14:1 and for the next 20 rounds they slowly fall towards 13:1. So for the majority of the rounds played, the odds are between 14:1 and 13:1.

Is there a set here?

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