Treasure every failure

Splash! And splash again! I’m engaged in a game of Battleship against my 7-year-old grandson. Competitiveness runs deep in our family and much to his amusement, he inflicts his first damage already at his second launch. I, on the other hand, need 26 tries to get my first hit. That’s a lot of splashes.

The loss is difficult to accept and therefore must lead to further reflection. How improbable is this? The math isn’t hard. On the 10 by 10 grid, 17 positions are reserved for the 5-ship fleet, the rest is water. In a simplified ‘urn model,’ the chance of having a starting sequence of 25 misses comes down to 0.5 percent. That’s a case of almost three sigma. Improbable, but apparently not impossible.