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If you keep flipping a coin you get heads or tails every time. There's no streak-breaking limit where you stop counting consecutive heads after some point. But
by majormajor 1y ago
If you keep flipping a coin you get heads or tails every time. There's no streak-breaking limit where you stop counting consecutive heads after some point. But here a streak can run into a loss-limiting wall "for this turn, you have $0, so you can't give any more away." That boundary - unless you allow infinite negative balances - breaks the first-glance intuition. As people hit 0, the amount of dollars that are redistributed on the next turn goes down. So the richest will still be losing their dollar a turn, but are less likely to gain a dollar. Which will have the most significant effect on people nearly-broke, since they will still lose, but gain less frequently.
- pfortuny 1y agoOK, interesting take which I had not realized: the problem is also different because there is a limited amount of cash, I now realize. However, the idea that “the mean distribution (the uniform, in this case)” needs to be near the N-th step one is what is statistically wrong, that is why I turned to the coin example. But yes, thanks for pointing out the differences!