User talk:Darrellp

An Additional Problem to Try

Now that you've done RCBF in F#, you might also want to try doing RCSNUSP. The logic is actually very similar so it's not a big challenge; you can probably start with your BF interpreter and adapt it. –Donal Fellows 08:48, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Monty Hall Optimizations

Hi Darrell, could you check this talk page section about a previous Perl implementation that made too many assumptions/optimizations, and make sure that you have not made too many optimisations rather than simulate what happens in the game? Thanks. --Paddy3118 09:13, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Respponse to Paddy

I'm new to Rosetta Code so I don't know the "official" way to respond to your request. I have no idea whether you'll ever see this, but here goes...

First of all, thanks for the suggestion. I went ahead and put in a version that explicitly does Monty's pick also. I put in a check to verify that Monty's pick had no effect on what the original code did and, unsurprisingly, that turns out to be the case. In cases like this, it's hard to see what should be "optimized out" and what shouldn't since part of the exercise is to "illustrate" over and above "calculate". I suppose that, in the extreme, you could "simulate" the problem by making the winner always be door 0 (without loss of generality) and also making my observation that in the switch strategy, if you originally pick the winner you lose in the end and vice verce so that the "simulation" consists of picking a random number between 0 and 2 and then checking if it's 0. I'll admit, that doesn't seem like much of a "simulation", though I think it's perfectly valid from a computational point of view. So I think we both agree that it's possible to "optimize out" the actual simulation. I guess it just depends on how far along that scale of "optimization" you're comfortable with. In the end, it feels to me like specifying Monty's pick is kind of like putting in code that specifies that the color of the door as an effort to more closely "simulate" the actual situation. Neither has any impact on the final outcome. Still, I understand that other people can have different feelings along these lines. I'm trying to meet two comfort levels by putting both versions in.

Again, thanks for the polite suggestion!