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Re: RandomDirichlet?

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On Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:11:22 -0700, Roedy Green
<see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

>I have a vaguely related little problem in my todo list.  
>Canada has 308 members of parliament.  If there were no bias toward
>males or females, what could you say to a novice about how far  from
>50/50 it could it stray and still be accounted for by random
>variation, not bias? Presumably using the 19 times of 20 beloved of
>pollsters.


I thought a more convincing way to answer would be a Monte Carlo
Applet that simulated unbiased elections and tracked results,
gradually building up a bell shaped curse.  It would compare the
simulation with the theoretical calculation.

-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really knows,
thinks, etc., because we’re hard put to define these things. 
We understand human mental processes only slightly better than
a fish understands swimming. 
~ John McCarthy (born: 1927-09-04 died: 2011-10-23 at age: 84).
Inventor of the term AI (Artificial Intelligence), 
the short-circuit OR operator (|| in Java), 
and LISP (LIst Processing Language) that makes EMACS 
(Extensible MACro System) so addictive.

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RandomDirichlet? Giovanni Azua <bravegag@hotmail.com> - 2011-11-01 10:09 +0100
  Re: RandomDirichlet? Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-01 07:50 -0400
    Re: RandomDirichlet? Giovanni Azua <bravegag@hotmail.com> - 2011-11-01 19:50 +0100
  Re: RandomDirichlet? Wojtek <nowhere@a.com> - 2011-11-01 04:54 -0700
  Re: RandomDirichlet? Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-01 06:11 -0700
    Re: RandomDirichlet? Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-01 06:16 -0700
    Re: RandomDirichlet? Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-01 20:23 -0400
      Re: RandomDirichlet? Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-02 01:39 -0700
        Re: RandomDirichlet? Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-02 08:17 -0400
  Re: RandomDirichlet? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-01 22:09 -0400

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