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Your chances aren't steadily increasing. The chance you finish within a week is higher than the chance you finish within a day, but your chance is no higher aft
by daveFNbuck 8y ago
Your chances aren't steadily increasing. The chance you finish within a week is higher than the chance you finish within a day, but your chance is no higher after a day than before it.
Consider an alternative algorithm based solely on chance. Pick an element uniformly at random and if it's larger than the element after it, swap them. This algorithm has progress, as the array becomes monotonically more sorted over time, decreasing the expected amount of time until the algorithm is done. This is what it looks like to make progress. Your algorithm does not have that feature.
- benj111 8y ago"The chance you finish within a week is higher than the chance you finish within a day, but your chance is no higher after a day than before it." You seem to be ignoring the fact you've just been spending a day rolling die, where if you had have rolled a 6 you wouldn't be back the next day. That's survivorship bias.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoI never said you couldn't eventually win. We're talking about whether you make progress leading up to the win. You could win at any time, but you never get closer to winning. If you had a progress bar based on how long left until you win, it wouldn't move until the moment you won.