As we know the year has just started and it is no surprise if you see totally random submissions show up on the leader board (by the way, is John going to award a January cash prize?)

My very first submission used to show up in the 10th place on the leader-board, luckily that embarrassment is now off the leader-board. I know that it was not a very scientific approach but I’d like to share it here with you as I always like to try this approach first.

For the first submission I used an importance sampling technique, meaning that I sample from a probability space according to a distribution. For example if my population is normally distributed with a mean M and variance V, after an infinite number of samples I should get a population that has mean of M and variance of V. (please look up the correct definition)

It may sound like a joke but it is a very useful technique when you use it on real outcomes, people design AI algorithms and chatbots with this simple method and they hope they win the Turing award someday . One of my predictions is that the team that will win the Turing award will have some kind of an importance sampling method in its core.

One of the advantages of this technique is that it inherits the properties of the original population for example if your original population shows a Markovian behavior; your sampled population will show that too. Therefore without knowing any of the underlying behaviors you will capture all of those behaviors.

Anyways, here is my importance sampling code. I’d like to think that no one will cheat in this competition but theoretically if you make a number of fake accounts and submit the results of this spreadsheet everyday with your many accounts you will have a really high chance of winning (or you can put together a very large team to submit them so it will not be against the rules, a totally Kosher approach). Just press F9 to produce a new submission. (This claim comes from our Darwinian world view that an infinite number of monkeys can reproduce Shakespeare’s work if they randomly tap on their keyboards)

Copyright: You are welcome to use, share or modify this spreadsheet. If you ended up winning the whole competition I appreciate some sort of acknowledgement

Here is the link

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