CS 35
Program 1
due Tuesday 30 Jan by midnight
This assignment was inspired by an article on mathematical proof
in the January-February
issue of "American Scientist" in which columnist Brian Hayes admits
to incorrectly deriving the probability that in a world series of
two evenly matched teams, one will win in a four game sweep. He
points out that proofs can sometimes be slippery and asserts that
he discovered his error because his derived answer did not match
the results of computer simulation he wrote.
The Assignment
Write, debug, and test a Java program that simulates n
world-series-like playoffs. Allow the user to specify
n. Also, allow the user to specify the number of games
it takes to win a single series (e.g. 2 for womens tennis,
3 for men's tennis (
Australian Open ),
4 for world series
(
World Series ) ),
and the probability
that team-a will beat team-b in any single contest.
Your output should show how many of the simulated series
were won by each team. For each possible number of games
in a series, your output should show how many of the simulated
series took that many games.
For extra fun (but NOT required), you could show for each
length series, how many were won by a and how many by b.
Here are a couple of sample runs of my solution:
<![CDATA[
Script started on Tue Jan 23 10:30:11 2007
dill% java Wseries2
This program will simulate a number of
world-series-like playoffs. You may supply
the number of series to simulate,
the number of games it takes to win a series,
and the probablility that team-a beats team-b.
How many series should we simulate (1-100000)? 100000
How many games to win one series (1-5)? 4
In any single game, what is the
probability that team a
beats team b (0.0-1.0)? 0.5
Of the 100000 series simulated:
team a won: 49901
team b won: 50099
12374 of them took 4 games.
24980 of them took 5 games.
31136 of them took 6 games.
31510 of them took 7 games.
Here is a table showing series length, number of series
of that length in the simulation, and for each series length,
the number of each team's wins in that length series.
length number awins bwins
4 12374 6093 6281
5 24980 12446 12534
6 31136 15597 15539
7 31510 15765 15745
dill% java Wseries2
This program will simulate a number of
world-series-like playoffs. You may supply
the number of series to simulate,
the number of games it takes to win a series,
and the probablility that team-a beats team-b.
How many series should we simulate (1-100000)? 100000
How many games to win one series (1-5)? 4
In any single game, what is the
probability that team a
beats team b (0.0-1.0)? 0.6
Of the 100000 series simulated:
team a won: 71060
team b won: 28940
15351 of them took 4 games.
26988 of them took 5 games.
29694 of them took 6 games.
27967 of them took 7 games.
Here is a table showing series length, number of series
of that length in the simulation, and for each series length,
the number of each team's wins in that length series.
length number awins bwins
4 15351 12828 2523
5 26988 20849 6139
6 29694 20532 9162
7 27967 16851 11116
dill% java Wseries2
This program will simulate a number of
world-series-like playoffs. You may supply
the number of series to simulate,
the number of games it takes to win a series,
and the probablility that team-a beats team-b.
How many series should we simulate (1-100000)? 100000
How many games to win one series (1-5)? 2
In any single game, what is the
probability that team a
beats team b (0.0-1.0)? 0.5
Of the 100000 series simulated:
team a won: 49957
team b won: 50043
50101 of them took 2 games.
49899 of them took 3 games.
Here is a table showing series length, number of series
of that length in the simulation, and for each series length,
the number of each team's wins in that length series.
length number awins bwins
2 50101 25097 25004
3 49899 24860 25039
dill% java Wseries2
This program will simulate a number of
world-series-like playoffs. You may supply
the number of series to simulate,
the number of games it takes to win a series,
and the probablility that team-a beats team-b.
How many series should we simulate (1-100000)? 100000
How many games to win one series (1-5)? 3
In any single game, what is the
probability that team a
beats team b (0.0-1.0)? 0.5
Of the 100000 series simulated:
team a won: 50013
team b won: 49987
25278 of them took 3 games.
37482 of them took 4 games.
37240 of them took 5 games.
Here is a table showing series length, number of series
of that length in the simulation, and for each series length,
the number of each team's wins in that length series.
length number awins bwins
3 25278 12704 12574
4 37482 18586 18896
5 37240 18723 18517
dill% java Wseries2
This program will simulate a number of
world-series-like playoffs. You may supply
the number of series to simulate,
the number of games it takes to win a series,
and the probablility that team-a beats team-b.
How many series should we simulate (1-100000)? 100000
How many games to win one series (1-5)? 3
In any single game, what is the
probability that team a
beats team b (0.0-1.0)? 0.75
Of the 100000 series simulated:
team a won: 89543
team b won: 10457
43592 of them took 3 games.
35180 of them took 4 games.
21228 of them took 5 games.
Here is a table showing series length, number of series
of that length in the simulation, and for each series length,
the number of each team's wins in that length series.
length number awins bwins
3 43592 42033 1559
4 35180 31611 3569
5 21228 15899 5329
dill% ^Dexit
Script done on Tue Jan 23 10:35:30 2007
dill%
]]>
Send me a tarball of a directory named by the first 4-letters of your
last name. That directory should contain the Java source code for all
the files needed for a solution. It should also contain a README text
file that tells me what your program can do and how to run it.
See /home/cfk/pub/cs35/week1/tarballREADME for an example of
building a tarball.
This week only Alex will be doing both Sunday and Monday
clinic sessions.
I should receive the email with tarball attached before midnight
on the due date for a program.