Monopoly produces a winner

Cork student Raphael Hurley won the top prize in the Esat Telecom Young Scientists Exhibition by studying how to win at Monopoly. But it hasn't made winning any easier.

He admitted there had been a "fairly significant improvement" in the quality of his game since he completed his statistical analysis of the best Monopoly properties, but added that "I still couldn't beat my family. Everything still very much comes down to luck."

For a game, he took the whole project very seriously, completing a study of similar Monopoly board analyses and reading up on advanced mathematics and probability theory. He even took a probability and chaos theory mathem atics course during the summer before launching himself into his project work last September.

His bottom line was establishing whether there was a statistical advantage associated with owning specific properties. For those in the know, this means which of your properties gets landed on the most by your competitors, which makes you richer and them poorer.

Raphael took the work much further, however, examining which properties earned the most and the number of turns needed before their owner broke even on the investment in land, houses and hotels.

He used an advanced computer programme, Mathematica, to track probabilities and matrix algebra to calculate the flow of the game. Then he used sophisticated mathematical Markov Processes in his efforts to force the random flow of a Monopoly game into statistical realities.

He started with a home made "Mini Monopoly" game with just 16 squares to test his systems. This gave him experience with the mathematical computations before moving on to the full 40-space Monopoly board.

His results confirm what old hands at the game have always maintained: go for the orange properties, or if you want to go upmarket, the greens.

The highest likely landing site after a throw of the dice is actually `Jail' at 10.04 per cent probability, because there are so many cards and board positions that send you there, he explained. `Go' is also a regular stop for the same reason. The three orange properties were the most frequently hit group at 6.94 per cent probability per throw, but the red's Patrick Street was the single most likely individual property to be hit, calculated at 2.52 per cent, followed by Store Street (2.38 per cent) and Dame Street (2.34 per cent).

Raphael is unsure what to do next with his project. "I could do computer simulations with a single player or analyse tactics for quality," he suggested. He hopes to be back at the exhibition in the next year or two, however.

He is equally unsure about his own future, being unwilling to decide what subject he might study as a career. "I don't want to narrow my choice because I am interested in almost everything."