What inspired the creation of Parrondos games?
J.M.R. Parrondo’s field of interest is the interface between information theory and thermodynamics. Because of this, Parrondo was naturally interested in the microscopic details of Maxwell demons. A device called a “Brownian ratchet” produces conterintuitive motion of particles and is of interest in the study of thermodynamic “demons.” Inspired by a version called the flashing ratchet, in 1996, Parrondo devised the games as a pedagogical illustration of the Brownian ratchet. There are close similarities between Brownian ratchets and Parrondo’s games—and it turns out that Parrondo’s games are a discrete-time and discrete-space version of the continuous flashing ratchet. Parrondo’s genius was in intuitively extracting the discrete games from the continuous ratchet model. In the early days of the Parrondo effect, however, this intuitive link was not rigorously established. This link was first mathematically established by Allison & Abbott (2002) and then independantly by Toral, Amengual &
