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I liked the simulation, and it reminds me of a tangentially related probability issue from early in my career. While still in college, I had a part-time job te
by CWuestefeld 13y ago
I liked the simulation, and it reminds me of a tangentially related probability issue from early in my career.
While still in college, I had a part-time job testing a spreadsheet product (back in the days when there were other commercial choices). One of the things we testers did to keep ourselves entertained was that we each picked a casino game, and implemented that game in spreadsheet macros. My game was blackjack, but another guy did craps.
Just for kicks, the guy who built the craps game re-wired it as an autoplay simulation, and left it playing against itself overnight. When we came back in in the morning, we found that the virtual player was rich, which seemed odd. So the next night we left it running again, and again the following morning, the player had made a bundle.
It turns out that my coworker had accidentally discovered a bug in the random number generator: the distribution of the results was a bit non-uniform.