‘There is an old saying that says, “too many cooks, spoil the broth.” In this web page the inverse is introduced, that is “many bad cooks, make good soup.”

From simple mathematics, we know that negating a negative number produces a positive number. In a game of chess, you might sacrifice pieces in order to win the overall game. But, can two losing games be set up to produce a winning scenario? The answer is yes. This counterintuitive behaviour is called “Parrondo’s Paradox.”

Parrondo’s games were devised by the Spanish physicist Juan M. R. Parrondo in 1996 and they were presented in unpublished form at a workshop in Torino, Italy. After about three years, in 1999, Harmer and Abbott published the seminal paper on the games, naming them after Parrondo who’s genius inspired them.

The main idea of Parrondo’s paradox is that two individually losing games can be combined to win via deterministic or non-deterministic mixing of the games.’

-from The Official Parrondo’s Paradox Page, via The New York Times 9th Annual Year in Ideas