OFFSET
0,6
COMMENTS
Constants such as this one and 0.64532 have importance with respect to the efficient usage of resources of various types and the minimization of opportunity costs: According to the Mero source, if 100000 players are considering entering Hofstadter's/Scientific American's million dollar game, an optimal mixed strategy for maximizing the magazine's expected loss -- thus maximizing the expected gain for the common good of all 100000 players -- is for each player to preselect an integer from 1 through 64532 and roll a 64532-sided die. A player should enter the game if and only if that player rolls his or her preselected number, which, of course will occur with probability 1/64532. (With instead a 100000-sided die the probability that no one enters is "about 37%" (Mero).). The game payout to the single randomly-selected winner from the pool of entrants is defined to be inversely proportional to the number of entrants: 1000000 if one entry, 500000 if two entries, etc.
REFERENCES
Laszlo Mero, Moral Calculations: Game Theory, Logic and Human Frailty, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 1998, pp. 15-21.
LINKS
G. C. Greubel, Table of n, a(n) for n = 0..10000
EXAMPLE
.0000154961879377673092419264860844232318849563007500154961879377673092419...
MATHEMATICA
Join[{0, 0, 0, 0}, RealDigits[1/64532, 10, 96][[1]]] (* G. C. Greubel, Sep 01 2017 *)
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
cons,nonn
AUTHOR
Rick L. Shepherd, Jul 31 2005
STATUS
approved