A Terrible Statistical Analysis of Pass the Pigs
At a grad school happy hour in late 2017, I was playing “Pass the Pigs” with my friends. The game boils down to rolling a few plastic pigs and getting points based on how they land. In practice, the plastic pigs function as (extremely) unfair dice.
The game works as follows:
- It’s your turn. Roll two pig dice.
- Refer to the above scoresheet and collect the correct number of points.
- Repeat steps 1 and 2
- You may “Pass the Pigs” to the next player at any point and lock in your accumulated points for that turn. However, if you roll a “Pig Out” at any time, you get zero points for that turn and must pass the pigs.
Thus, the game boils down to rolling the pigs as many times as you think you can get away with before rolling a Pig Out. The game ends when some unspecified number of points is reached (we didn’t have the rule sheet at happy hour, just the scoring card and the pig dice).
Naturally, I was curious as to what the optimal pig-rolling strategy was, and I had a set of pig dice and way too much time on my hands. I rolled the pig dice 574 times on my desk, tallied the results, and wrote an article summarizing my findings. I’m going to post the article in its original form, because having this… uh… research paper formatted on the Optics Letters template just makes it funnier.
I wrote this article back in 2017, and as a second year graduate student, of course I forgot to cite the relevant prior literature, so I’ll include a list of links here for more pig reading. Perhaps I should do a meta-analysis of the (surprisingly large) corpus of pig-dice research out there.
John C. Kern, 2006: Pig Data and Bayesian Inference on Multinomial Probabilities
Michael F. Gorman, 2012: Analytics, Pedagogy and the Pass the Pigs Game
Dayne Batten, from 2015 but pasted from an earlier blog: Optimal Pass the Pigs Strategy (Part One)
Dylan Black, 2017: A Terrible Statistical Analysis of Pass the Pigs
Marcus Wilson (?), 2020: Pass the pigs — ad (almost) infinitum
Numberphile, from 2021: https://youtu.be/ULhRLGzoXQ0
Originally published at https://maximumeffort.substack.com on November 28, 2021.
