One of the Embarrassments of Applied Mathematics
I almost never win when I’m playing solitaire. I asked Google what the typical odds of winning solitaire were so I could feel better, and Wikipedia told me
- The kind of solitaire I play (the most common kind) is called “Klondike”.
- ‘The odds of winning a standard game of non-Thoughtful Klondike are currently unknown. It has been said that the inability for theoreticians to calculate these odds is “one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics”‘.