I'm not defending this shit-tastic code or its equally shit-tastic fake prediction. But you should know there's a thing called a Monte Carlo simulation. The simple description of it is to set up a simulation with (sensibly) randomized inputs and then to run the simulation a million times, and once you've got the results, look to see if they converge on an answer or have an otherwise identifiable pattern.
Indeed, that's one reason this code is shit -- the way they re-order one of their internal lists during execution is non-deterministic (ie probably skull fucked by the os thread scheduling). Nevertheless, assuming an acceptably-random value is generated whenever your rand() function is called, it's worth pointing out that the whole point of a Monte Carlo simulation is to show that a model converges on an answer or a pattern of answers, regardless of what random values are used from pass to pass. In this case, the failure to maintain determinism is more of a bug than it is an inherent design flaw, and ultimately has no bearing on the accuracy of the answer.
I'm not defending this shit-tastic code or its equally shit-tastic fake prediction. But you should know there's a thing called a Monte Carlo simulation. The simple description of it is to set up a simulation with (sensibly) randomized inputs and then to run the simulation a million times, and once you've got the results, look to see if they converge on an answer or have an otherwise identifiable pattern.
Indeed, that's one reason this code is shit -- the way they re-order one of their internal lists during execution is non-deterministic (ie probably skull fucked by the os thread scheduling). Nevertheless, assuming an acceptably-random value is generated whenever your rand() function is called, it's worth pointing out that the whole point of a Monte Carlo simulation is to show that a model converges on an answer or a pattern of answers, regardless of what random values are used from pass to pass. In this case, the failure to maintain determinism is more of a bug than it is an inherent design flaw, and ultimately has no bearing on the accuracy of the answer.