The flashing Brownian ratchet and Parrondo’s paradox

A Brownian ratchet is a one-dimensional diffusion process that drifts towards a minimum of a periodic asymmetric sawtooth potential. A flashing Brownian ratchet is a process that alternates between two regimes, a one-dimensional Brownian motion and a Brownian ratchet, producing directed motion. These processes have been of interest to physicists and biologists for nearly 25 years. The flashing Brownian ratchet is the process that motivated Parrondo’s paradox, in which two fair games of chance, when alternated, produce a winning game. Parrondo’s games are relatively simple, being discrete in time and space. The flashing Brownian ratchet is rather more complicated. We show how one can study the latter process numerically using a random walk approximation.