# Posts Tagged ‘ Simulation ’

## Random sudokus [p-values]

May 21, 2010
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I reran the program checking the distribution of the digits over 9 “diagonals” (obtained by acceptable permutations of rows and column) and this test again results in mostly small p-values. Over a million iterations, and the nine (dependent) diagonals, four p-values were below 0.01, three were below 0.1, and two were above (0.21 and 0.42).

## Random [uniform?] sudokus [corrected]

May 19, 2010
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As the discrepancy in the sum of the nine probabilities seemed too blatant to be attributed to numerical error given the problem scale, I went and checked my R code for the probabilities and found a choose(9,3) instead of a choose(6,3) in the last line… The fit between the true distribution and the

## Random [uniform?] sudokus

May 19, 2010
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A longer run of the R code of yesterday with a million sudokus produced the following qqplot. It does look ok but no perfect. Actually, it looks very much like the graph of yesterday, although based on a 100-fold increase in the number of simulations. Now, if I test the adequation with a basic chi-square

## Random sudokus [test]

May 17, 2010
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Robin Ryder pointed out to me that 3 is indeed the absolute minimum one could observe because of the block constraint (bon sang, mais c’est bien sûr !). The distribution of the series of 3 digits being independent over blocks, the theoretical distribution under uniformity can easily be simulated: #uniform distribution on the block diagonal

## Random sudokus

May 16, 2010
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$Random sudokus$

After thinking about random sudokus for a few more weeks, I eventually came to read the paper by Newton and DeSalvo about the entropy of sudoku matrices. As written earlier, if we consider (as Newton and DeSakvo) a uniform distribution where the sudokus are drawn uniformly over the set of all sudokus, the entropy of

## Computational Statistics

May 9, 2010
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Do not resort to Monte Carlo methods unnecessarily. When I received this 2009 Springer-Verlag book, Computational Statistics, by James Gentle a while ago, I briefly took a look at the table of contents and decided to have a better look later… Now that I have gone through the whole book, I can write a short

## Forsythe’s algorithm

May 8, 2010
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$Forsythe’s algorithm$

In connection with the Bernoulli factory post of last week, Richard Brent arXived a short historical note recalling George Forsythe’s algorithm for simulating variables with density when (the extension to any upper bound is straightforward). The idea is to avoid computing the exponential function by simulating uniforms until since the probability of this event is

## The Bernoulli factory

April 22, 2010
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$The Bernoulli factory$

A few months ago, Latuszyński, Kosmidis, Papaspiliopoulos and Roberts arXived a paper I should have noticed earlier as its topic is very much related to our paper with Randal Douc on the vanilla Rao-Blackwellisation scheme. It is motivated by the Bernoulli factory problem, which aims at (unbiasedly) estimating f(p) from an iid sequence of Bernoulli

## Sudokus more random than random!

April 18, 2010
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$Sudokus more random than random!$

Darren Wraith pointed out this column about sudokus to me. It analyses the paper by Newton and De Salvo published in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences A that I cannot access from home. The discussion contains this absurd sentence “Sudoku matrices are actually more random than randomly-generated matrices” which shows how mistreated