Over this summer I've competed in the SLICED ML competition, where contestants have two hours to create a Kaggle submission. I share what I learned about competitive machine learning and R.
Solving a puzzle from 538's The Riddler column: if you pass cranberry sauce randomly around a table of 20, who is most likely to be the last person to get it?
Solving a puzzle from 538's the Riddler column: if N prisoners have a choice to flip a coin, and go free as long as one coin is flipped and all coins are heads, what strategy should they take to maximize their chances? Another demonstration of probabilistic reasoning and tidy simulation.
Solving a puzzle from 538's The Riddler column: if new spam comments appear at an average rate of one per day, including on other spam comments, how many can we expect after three days?