Adam Hooper's Code

This is a directory of my public code.

Path: cards/

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README

Copyright (c) Adam Hooper, 2002

cards.c -- The Story:

One night, at a party where one lucky person was turning 26,
some innocent individual joked that said person was "half a
deck of cards". And then it happened: An evil madman asked,
"Ah, but what's the probability that in that half a deck lie
all four aces"?

At first, people started blathering about 50%. But that was
easily proven wrong, with the simple question, "Okay, then
what's the probability that 2 and only 2 cards are aces?".

Statistics has an answer: (26 choose 4) / (52 choose 4), which
amounts to about 5.5%. But it's hard to take this number on
faith alone -- proof is needed.

This program simulates drawing 26 cards from a deck and decides
how many of them are aces. And it does it again and again
and again. It's pretty fast, but rand() really slows it down;
it managed 1,000,000 tests in under 7 minutes CPU time on my
Athlon XP 1600+.

Usage: run <number of tests>

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