Nice writeup. After reading the first paragraph, I challenged myself to come up with something and here it is: https://gist.github.com/a982f1fee5116d289323 htt

Nice writeup. After reading the first paragraph, I challenged myself to come up with something and here it is: https://gist.github.com/a982f1fee5116d289323 https://gist.github.com/a982f1fee5116d289323 Example run: expected: a 0.166666666667 b 0.333333333333 c 0.5 observed: a 0.168 b 0.291 c 0.541 For a list of n items to choose from, it appears that pick() will terminate on the first iteration of the scary-looking while 1 loop with probability ~1/n. For n = 3, and I've run this many times, I've not seen the number of iterations exceed 30. For n = 26 it easily goes into the ~200 range at the extreme.