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Comment by kirillseva | Hacker News Reader

Modified the problem from this post to also include debt. If someone doesn't have the funds to pay during the turn, they have to borrow money from the person they should be giving it to, and pay back with interest.

Check out the source and the produced animation here: https://gist.github.com/kirillseva/961fa1f5b5d64254e0117caf1...

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with the following parameters:

  NUM_PEOPLE    = 45
  INITIAL_BANK  = 45   # everyone gets 45 dollars
  INTEREST_RATE = 0.1  # 10% per turn that you didn't pay
  ROUNDS        = 5000
  RENT          = 1    # how much to pay each round

everybody's cash goes to zero on step 1008. From that point on all trades are debt manipulations only

edit(formatting)

> everybody's cash goes to zero on step 1008

Surely not in the highly improbable case of everyone starting with 1 dollar, giving money to someone else in a chain that leads back to themselves? Theoretically such a system could continue indefinitely? (a gives to b gives to c gives to.... a)?

correct, if we sample without replacement here https://gist.github.com/kirillseva/961fa1f5b5d64254e0117caf1...

then we'd indeed have a balanced situation where everybody keeps their initial balance. However, we do sample with replacement, and at some point a lucky winner is going to start hoarding cash. Until such time when no one has cash to pay the winner, and he's ultrawealthy... on paper

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