You’d think combining two losing strategies would make things worse. Parrondo’s Paradox says the opposite. In game-theory and stochastic processes, Parrondo’s Paradox describes a counterintuitive phenomenon: two games with negative expected value can produce a positive expected value when alternated in the right way. Classic setup: • Game A: a biased coin with a slight disadvantage (e.g., win prob = 0.495). • Game B: a conditional game where the coin bias depends on your current capital (state-dependent probabilities). Individually, both games lose over time. But when you alternate them — randomly or periodically — the system can drift upward. Why this happens (non-handwavy version): • Each game has its own probability landscape • Alternation reshapes the state distribution • This breaks the steady-state trapping that causes losses • The combined Markov chain has a positive drift This isn’t magic — it’s nonlinear dynamics + state dependence. The paradox shows up in physics (Brow...