Excel formula needed

Mankysteve

Richard Dawkins has brilliant chapter on probability in one his books (I can't remember ill edit with the name)Basically in a system such as roulette table the odds of the ball of falling on certain position is always the same. Nature doesn't care what happened before. The wheel doesn't have a memory neither does the ball. Its a statistically fallacy to believe that your odds change with each spin of the wheel. There is no such thing as a law averages. Presuming a fair table.

The odds of ball stopping in certain position are always 1 in 37(38 in American game) It doesn't matter if the ball has landed in the same position a100 times, (The table is most likely not fair but presuming it is) the chances of what position is lands on next is still 1 in 37

It's really hard idea to get your head around it confused me at first

Mirno

WTFH is right except with one minor point.
When you win you get double back so you'll walk away with £9.72 of your tenner.

This isn't something excel will be good at - it's a stateful problem.
The increment is determined by previous results.

You *could* simulate this using the "ref" function, and the width of the spreadsheet as "time". but it'd be absolutely horrible!

Mirno

Cornucopia

Maybe you could treat the bids as a single string? With a second cell saying whether the round was won or lost?

I would probably have tried it by now... were it not for the fact that I already know it doesn't work.

Mirno

A further follow up - if you like perl code:

my @series = (1,2,3,4);

for (my $i = 0; $i < 10; $i++)
{
  if (rand() < 0.5)
  {
    # Win!
    push &#64;series, $series[0] + $series[-1];
  }
  else
  {
    #Lose!
    shift &#64;series;
    pop &#64;series;
  }

  if (&#64;series == 0)
  {
    print "Ran out of numbers in the series - bail on item $i\n";
    last;
  }

  print join(",", &#64;series) . "\n";
}

With sample output (it took a few attempts as there's a pretty good chance it'll hit the early exit condition before it reaches itteration 10):
1,2,3,4,5
1,2,3,4,5,6
2,3,4,5
2,3,4,5,7
2,3,4,5,7,9
2,3,4,5,7,9,11
3,4,5,7,9
3,4,5,7,9,12
3,4,5,7,9,12,15
3,4,5,7,9,12,15,18

Mirno

JimmyTheWig

Not quite sure what you want, OP.

Do you want a formula in Excel to add the lowest and highest numbers in a range?
So if you start with 1, 2, 3, 4 in cells A2, A3, A4, A5 then
=MIN(A2:A5)+MAX(A2:A5)
will give you 1+4 = 5

Does that help?