The problem, first posed by an Italian monk in the late 1400s, had remained unsolved for nearly two hundred years. The issue in question was to decide how the stakes of a game of chance should be divided if that game were not completed for some reason. The example used in the original publication referred to a game of balla where six goals were required to win the game.

If the game ended normally, the winner would take all. But what if the game stopped when one player was in the lead by five goals to three? In seeking a solution to the problem, Pascal entered into correspondence with the lawyer and mathematician Pierre de Fermat. Between the two of them they laid the foundations of modern probability theory. What Fermat and Pascal realized was that the solution came from listing all of the possibilities and then counting the proportion...
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