Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: high-school presentation, suggestions? Date: 21 Mar 2024 21:08:49 GMT Organization: Stefan Ram Lines: 14 Expires: 1 Feb 2025 11:59:58 GMT Message-ID: References: <87il1f8o3u.fsf@tudado.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de ON824hs/Id0ge5QjvmO83Ad16Smg2zZ47KpXsIEQdAJOLJ Cancel-Lock: sha1:X7EkuOQBcIN2iGui/knwpU6jkio= sha256:3NSsigm1aqoQjriilI1V0ATNCFT2zdR+cDYCM+xoScE= X-Copyright: (C) Copyright 2024 Stefan Ram. All rights reserved. Distribution through any means other than regular usenet channels is forbidden. It is forbidden to publish this article in the Web, to change URIs of this article into links, and to transfer the body without this notice, but quotations of parts in other Usenet posts are allowed. X-No-Archive: Yes Archive: no X-No-Archive-Readme: "X-No-Archive" is set, because this prevents some services to mirror the article in the web. But the article may be kept on a Usenet archive server with only NNTP access. X-No-Html: yes Content-Language: en-US Accept-Language: de-DE-1901, en-US, it, fr-FR Bytes: 2185 Johanne Fairchild wrote or quoted: >I asked myself---why does the shuffling make the game likely to end? Periodicity (getting into a loop) often is not stable. When you start at noon and repeatedly add 12 hours, then you get the repeating sequence "noon - midnight - noon - midnight - ...". But if instead you add 12 hours plus a random time (even a small one), the outcome nearly always will not be periodic anymore. Now, imagine that there is some "end rule". For example, the addition stops, once a time between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. is reached. With the periodic sequence "noon - midnight - noon - midnight - ..." this end interval will /never/ be reached. But when a random time is added, it should often be reached.