In general statistics can be considered as the offspring of the theory of probability, it builds on its parent and extends the area of patronymic jur… - Richard Arnold Epstein

One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact (thus totaling the 365 days of the year and harmonizing the lunar and solar calendars).

While no rigorous proof of an optimal strategy has been achieved, Robbins has proposed the principal of "staying on a winner" and has shown it to be uniformly better than a strategy of random selection.

A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution.