Bring it on

One of my friends has challenged me to repeat my Ninja Monkey experiment for September 2019. Those who follow my Facebook page will know the good goss, but here it is in a nutshell:

• I have Spider Solitaire on my i-phone.
• This software comes with “daily challenges” where a fresh deal is provided for every day, akin to a random number generator – thus if you enter the same “seed” of e.g. 15 August 2019 fifty times you will play the same hand fifty times etc. NB: Players are restricted to any day between 1^st of previous month and today.
• However, I believe the RNG is not uniform and if we choose any month then games corresponding to later days are harder than games corresponding to earlier days
• This can be done via statistics: choose 2 days of the same month at random and let Ninja Monkey compute the “equity” of games corresponding to both days. The probability that the later game is harder than the earlier game should be 50%,
• but my actual probability was significantly higher (p-value < 05) when I tested the games in July 2019.

I am now going to repeat the same experiment for September, and I am laying my friend 4:1 odds in his favour that I will not get the same result as my July data.  My friend told me that twenty 66,85,76,76,83,72,73,84 tests should give one significant result (as if I didn’t already know!). But I was definitely not cherry picking. Even if I am wrong, I will have no regrets. To put it in Poker terms, my experimental results force me to call all the way to the river and if I am beat … then I am beat. We are using happy stars as currency, so it’s not as though my credit card details are at stake.

Bring. It. On.