Demons, Ratchets and Parrondo's Paradox

It’s a strange, counterintuitive phenomenon: a system of two guaranteed losing games than can actually produce a winning result. And not by playing them with a highly specific strategy: it’s even possible for two losing games to generate a guaranteed winner even when the games are pick at random. It was first described in terms of games by Spanish Physicist Juan Perrondo, whose work started with thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, exploring scenarios like Feynman’s Ratchets, perpetual brownian motion machines, Maxwell demons, and ending up influencing fields including quantum information and evolutionary biology.
SISSA director Stefano Ruffo was able to sit down with Juan Parrondo for an explanation of his most famous result, the intellectual history behind the Paradox, and the future of this field of research.