Doug's Random Sampling Applet: The Amazing Story

Before my sister and I were born, my parents sold the dice from the family Monopoly game to buy heroin.  So when I grew up, we would play this way:  Player 1 would move one square.  Then Player 2 would move one square.  Then Player 1 would move two squares, followed by Player 2 doing likewise.  We'd progress to three, four, five, etc.  We noticed that the person who went first usually won, being able to buy all the property first.  We tried varying the rule, replacing {1,2,3,4,5...} with {2, 4, 6, 8, 10,...}, but this didn't change the result.  At that point I realized that I needed to invent a device to create an arbitrary, or "random" number.

Unfortunately, I was ahead of my time.  The technology to do what I needed didn't exist until the mid-80s, when JAVA was invented.   I wrote a JAVA application to generate a random number, and was ready to present it to the world.  I described my invention to a graduate school colleague, who immediately took two sugar cubes, made marks on them with a pencil, and described "dice" to me.  I was crushed.

I stayed in my office, depressed, until three in the morning.  I finally left, but took a wrong turn, and wound up in a previously unexplored corridor of the University of Michigan math building.  I had just realized I was lost when I heard a clattering, as if someone had just dropped a bag of marbles in zero gravity, and they were clicking and clacking and rebounding in an eternal cycle.   I soon found the room from which the sounds were coming, and I opened the door.

I found about 15 people, mostly male, ranging in age from 25 through about 70.  They were all on their knees, rolling dice, but they weren't playing Monopoly, Yahtzee, or any game that I could see.  They looked sad, but resigned to their fate, repeatedly rolling dice and marking sheets of paper.

"Who are you people, and what is the meaning of your curious behavior?" I asked.

The eldest stood up, and cleared his throat, as if he had not spoken to anybody for some time.  He wore a tattered herringbone suit-jacket, and had a long white beard.  "We," he said, "are the Statisticians.   We toil at night, for we need to use large quantities of random numbers during the day for our random sampling.  So while you and the other mathematicians sleep, we labor here, generating them with our dice-cubes."

I couldn't help staring at these "Statisticians," who looked so similar to me and the other mathematicians.   Could it be that an accident of birth was the only reason that I wasn't a Statistician, slaving away through the night?  Now that I knew of the existence of this community, could I ever forget it?

It was then that I knew that it was my destiny to take my random-number generator, and modify it, changing it into a tool that would create random samples, thus saving the Statisticians from their horrendous burdens.  It wasn't long before I had created such a tool.  The tale of my quest to find the Statisticians' office again, and the interesting people and creatures I met on the way, is best saved for another time.  Suffice to say that I did find them again, and showed them the URL to Doug's Random Sampling Applet.  "Hooray!" said their spokesperson.  "We are saved!  We, and the others!"

"Others?" I asked.

"Yes," said the bearded man.  "There are Statisticians in Universities throughout the land.  And all of them are freed from their laughing-bone-bondage thanks to you."  I felt myself being raised upon the shoulders of some of the sturdier members of the band.  "On this day, be it known that you are an honorary Statistician!" he called out.  "How may we repay you?"

"You just have," I laughed, and then we all left the mysterious office to go to our homes, and sleep the sleep of the victorious.


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