It is well known that chess pieces can be sacrificed in order to win the overall game. In population genetics, the fitness of an animal species sometimes declines first in order to evolve to a higher level of survival fitness.
Engineers know that unstable control systems paradoxically stabilize if combined in the right way.
The answer is yes. This strikingly counterintuitive result is called Parrondo's Paradox. We will take a look at some simple examples and show that this effect is in fact a discrete-time manifestation of a Brownian ratchet.