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 participants couldn't be sure that I hadn't run the code thousands of times until I got a result guaranteeing that people I liked got into the race. So instead we roll dice live and in public.

Thanks to UC Berkeley Stats Professor (and ultrarunner, and former colleague at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science where he led the Reproducibility and Open Science working group of which I was a part) Philip Stark for this idea, which he used for much more serious stuff--namely risk-limiting audits of elections. Thanks to Colorado for caring about election security enough to enact this fraud prevention. Thanks to RD Caleb Efta for taking me up on my offer to volunteer to set this up. I'm happy that instead of just complaining about what I think is bad about other race lotteries, I got to help implement what I think is a better system (and it's fun that my reproducible stats world and my ultrarunning world collided).



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adze Picket Co. (I Love the PCT)

The 50th Year of Trying to Hold the Western States Endurance Run