It was as if the Dutch Broadcast Foundation (NOS) waited for our article to appear last March before touching on the topic of drugs dumpings in the Netherlands again. And so it came to pass, two weeks after posting the article, that the NOS announced a new increase in the number of dumpings in 2019 (see the article in the NOS). The 292 dumpings recorded in 2019 do clearly exceed the count (207) of 2018. For the different datasets, discussed in the article, this result in a streak of length four (p=0.01), respectively three (p=0.04). Statistically speaking we can now reject the null hypothesis, the drugs-related crime did not change over these years and conclude that something seriously bad is going on.
Most of you will agree with my girlfriend that when the number of drugs dumping increases for three years in a row, this points to an increase in the demand for drugs, the number of illegal producers, the amount of drugs produced etc. Doing some math you will see this may not be the case.
A mathematician once told me that problems that are very simple to state can be very deceiving, and sometimes turn out to be extremely difficult to solve. One such problem was the Four Color Problem.
In this article, we will discuss a mathematical riddle that "seems impossible even if you know the answer". It is better known as the 100 prisoners problem.
In this article Maya continues her journey from Rotterdam to Brussels. She starts thinking about a puzzle from her childhood, the three utilities problem. At the end of the jouney she has reached a very important theorem from graph theory!
