In today's Mathcad blog post, "Words with Friends and Mathcad Prime 2.0", you can read about how I brought two very different, but enjoyable topics together- Mathcad Prime 2.0 and the "Words with Friends" app. In this post I use Mathcad Prime 2.0 to help me find the odds of being able to play a 7 letter word on my first turn using permutations. Here is an excerpt:
"If you’ve ever played Scrabble you know there is a special bonus that many players strive to achieve, but many never do- using all seven of your letters in one turn. This is called a bingo in the United States and Canada, a “Scrabble” in parts of Europe, and a “bonus” elsewhere, and results in a 50 point bonus. So I started thinking about what the odds would be to get a bingo on your first turn. To calculate this probability I had to pick a specific seven letter word for the sake of time. I started brainstorming and the first seven letter words these came to mind were blogger, giraffe, and lasagna. But, then the best seven letter world of all popped into my head, M-A-T-H-C-A-D! I decided I would have to find out what the chances of drawing the letters to spell Mathcad on my first turn would be in a game of Scrabble. I used Mathcad Prime 2.0 and an article by Alan Salzberg to help me with these calculations (luckily)."
You can read the full post here.
Enjoy!
