Comment on Soup of Theseus

• TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ok, I couldn’t resist. Here are the results of running that simulation 6000 times.

  histogram

     Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
     1085    1126    1140    1144    1157    1292       0 
  

  This means that about half the time it’s somewhere between 1126 and 1157 spoons.

  FYI: /u/protist@mander.xyz, /u/Sabin10@lemmy.world, /u/neo2478@sh.itjust.works

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  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    By the way, how did you actually stimulate it? Surely you didn’t keep 10^25 variables in memory…

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    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I thought of making a vector with a length of about 1.671398e+25, but then I remembered what one time when when I tried to make a linear model with hundreds of dimensions. So yeah… We have gigabytes of RAM, and it’s still not enough. Not really a problem, as long as you don’t try to do anything completely ridiculous.

      Instead, I just made a variable that simply contains the number of soup molecules and another one for the number of water molecules. Far simpler that way.

      Here’s where the magic happens:

      # Number of soup molecules drawn
      soup_molecules_replaced <- rbinom(1, replacement_count, prob_soup)
      

      The rbinom function is used to generate random numbers from a binomial distribution. It’s a discrete probability distribution that models the number of successes, i.e. scooping out a soup molecule. Rest of the codes is just basic infrastructure like variables, loops, etc.

      BTW the variable names look ugly, because I couldn’t be bothered to tidy everything up. I really prefer camelCase, whereas Mistral seems to prefer underscores. That’s what you get for vibing.

      Side note: If you do this kind of stuff for private purposes, you have to rely on your own hardware. If you plan to publish your discoveries, universities and publicly funded supercomputers might be an option. If there exists a Journal Of Recreational Mathematics And Useless Simulations (JORMAUS), I could totally publish this stuff and maybe even run my code on a supercomputer.

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      • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Interesting. I don’t know why I didn’t think of just keeping a count of soup molecules. Must have been late!

        Another interesting point, your simulation is subtly wrong in a different way from my calculation. When there is only one soup molecule left, there is a chance (however tiny) that rbinom will return 2 or more, taking out more soup molecules than there really are.

        If you run it enough times with a bowl of 3 molecules and a spoon of 2 molecules, I’m sure you’ll hit -1 soup molecules some of the time.

        For a simulation I think we can do better. There must be a random function that does it properly. The function we want is like pulling balls of 2 colors out of a sack without replacement. Pretty common combinatorics question, I would expect a random function to match.

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  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You rock! Thank you :)

    If I find myself in the right mood I might try to work out the actual distribution. If I do, your simulation will be a very handy sanity check!

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    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If you want, I can increase the sample size. Just need to figure out how to add a timer to the code and set it to run for a few hours, maybe even overnight. A histogram with 10^6 bins should look pretty smooth.

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• TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’m tempted to run a full simulation that really picks those molecules randomly.

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