I'm not so hopeless after all, mum!

So, I'm sitting here trying to work out if I'm any better at the Entanglement game than a trained monkey, when my phones rings. It's my friend, calling on the way to the airport for a romantic weekend in Bangkok with a new lover. "What are you up to?", she asks (except she's Californian, so she actually says, "Hey! Wotcha doin'?"). "Trying to see if I'm better than a trained monkey at playing a computer game", I don't reply, partly because I'd then have to explain about the monkey.

And I'm pleased to announce that I am indeed better than a trained monkey. Yay, me! My mother will be pleased. Although no doubt she'll find fault somewhere. Still, at least she didn't raise a complete idiot. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm just not very good at this game though. The best scores every day are all 400+, and I've only passed 300 once. I have no idea how that happened as the score just appeared without my knowing what was going on. Maybe the monkey did it while I was making a cup of tea?

So how did I do (and a chance to insert some images for the first time)? I played 30 games using each approach. The top graph shows the mean score after each game, the bottom one shows the standard deviation. The monkey is red, and I'm blue.

The main points are that my strategy produced better and more consistent results. I also improved with time, whereas the algorithmic approach didn't. Maybe that was because I started to hone my strategy, but this isn't really about me. Just look at the opportunities there are for the classroom!

I'm not expecting 11-year old students to be computing variances, but they can draw bar charts and pie charts, calculate means and ranges, and interpret their data. Surely that has to be a whole lot more fun, and hopefully therefore a whole lot more memorable as they have something enjoyable to hang the ideas on. How about some display work? One class against another? So we've tricked them into doing some work while they play the game, and then again when they analyse the results!

Well, I think I'm done with Entanglement, at least for the time being. It now feels like one of those moments at the end of a Simpson's episode, when Homer and Marge are looking back on the events of the previous twenty or so minutes, and wondering what it all means. Maybe there is no meaning? Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happened?