Coincidentally last Thanksgiving I developed a bingo in j for my Mom who is quite demented, to see if she could play and was pleasantly surprised that she could play one card at a time. The card was hand written because I could not connect my iPad to a printer. It was pretty easy to use j to generate the cards, the call sequence, and an automatic card player. Soon after I left her I also generated lots of cards that could be played automatically to simulate bingo in a small parlor to try to estimate how many calls it takes in a single game for a winner to be declared, depending on how many people play.
The stem and leaf diagram below shows the outcome of 51 games with 30 players/cards in each game for one typical simulation. It means that the fastest game was won in 9 moves, and the slowest game took 30 moves. The median game length was 20, which can be verified by counting 25 games above and 25 games below one of the five 20s in this sample. (I chose odd numbers of games to make the median calculation easy.) 5 | 9 10 | 122224444 15 | 5566678888999 20 | 0000011222223344444 25 | 55556667 30 | 0 It was also interesting to study what won most often, rows, columns, or diagonals. I did not allow other ways to win, but there may be others. Fun. -- (B=) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
