Posts

Showing posts from November, 2019

A Transparent and Reproducible Ultramarathon Lottery

I wrote the code to transparently and reproducibly run the High Lonesome 100 lottery, which will be conducted tonight (November 15, 2019). The code is available on Github here , and the web app to actually implement the lottery is here . The app has all the details and instructions, but simply put, you just need to pick the seed for R's pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). I don't understand all the gory details of how PRNGs work, but basically, if you write code involving randomly generated numbers, you can set the seed so that every time the code is run you get the same answer. In order to fairly set the seed, the race director Caleb Efta will have public participants roll several 10-sided dice at Laws Whiskey Bar in Denver Colorado tonight. If you didn't set a seed, the code would give you a different answer every time you ran it, so participants couldn't be sure which run the actual results came from. If we just picked some arbitrary seed (my usual is 1492) then