See the Probablistic Simulation example before trying this project.

Your Task:

• Pick a system that can be simulated. This could be a game or sport, the stock market, human behavior, a natural phenomenon (i.e. something about science), or many other things.
• Create some questions that you want to ask about this system.
• Create a set of rules and assumptions that can calculate an outcome. This set of rules is your model. Start very simple!
• Write a program that simulates your model using one or more random inputs.
• Code your model to repeat itself many times, saving the results each time. The code that repeats your model and saves results is your simulation.
• Record the insights from your results.

You will create a presentation about your simulation. Slides should include the following:

• The system you’re studying and the questions you’re asking
• Description of the rules and assumptions that make up the model
• Discussion of your results

That’s the minimum, but you should also play around with your model to see what happens when you change the rules in various ways.

When you get your first set of results, that should ideally trigger some more questions. You can continue to update your model and simulation to help answer those new questions. Keep doing that until you run out of project work time!

What you turn in:

• Presentation slides
• Python program
• Sample results (save output as .txt file)

Need Ideas?

• Pick a game and figure out how often a certain situation could come up. This could be a card game, a dice game, a board game, or any other game with a discreet number of possibilities.
• Pick a sport situation and simulate it. The model could look at components of a game (like plate appearances in baseball and their possible outcomes) or it could look at entire games or seasons.
• Simulate a company’s stock value. Add a range of probabilities for the stock to increase or decrease. Include possibilities for stocks to be influenced drastically by outside events or crash due to internal problems.
• Look up statistics relevant to teenagers, and simulate how many students in a class of 24 would deal with certain issues that you want to study.
• Predict the possible range of results of an election or multiple elections. You’ll need to choose some inputs that could change the probabilities in the future (possibility of economy improving or worsening, scandals, world events, etc).
• Figure out how unlucky you were to hit X number of red lights in a row. Note: different lights will have different probabilities. If you’re feeling fancy, you can consider that red lights can be correlated with each other, depending on the overall timing of the traffic light system.