I have no idea what this article is talking about, but if there are two plausible representations for the whatever-it-is, why not allow it to be represented both ways ?
It's actually worse than that. If we take a population with only median and maximum talents, the probabilities for each event are: halving: p=0.5, doubling
because median-or-above talent: p=0.5*0.6. Meaning that in 80% of the events for a given actor the talent is not considered at all.
So the result that luck plays a larger part isn't an emergent property of the model, it was explicitly baked into the model from the start.
It wouldn't be unfair to call this paper fraudulent.
Their model has a set of agents with a 'talent' normally distributed between 0 and 1 (mean 0.6, SD 0.1).
Each agent gets a random series of doubling and halving events. The doubling is applied with probability = 'talent'.
The lengths of the series of events have an exponentially decreasing distribution (four longer is x10 less probable, approximately).
The application of these series of events to the agent is supposed to simulate a life history of random opportunities, exploited according to talent.
BUT...
Half the events are losses, half the events are possible (P<1) gains. So for an agent with average luck (which is every agent in the long term), their capital decreases with time. The simulation has been rigged so agents can only win with luck.
As others have pointed out, the computations are currently infeasable. The rest of the plan works though, it would just need to be done with actual atoms.
Are there any plans to remove threading from python ?
A year or two ago I read up on the various efforts to make a fast, more parallel CPython, and one of the core underlying problems seemed to be the use of machine threads, resulting in a very high locking load as the large (potentially unlimited) number of threads attempted to defend against each other.
Letting an operating system run random fragments of your code at random times is very much a self-inflicted wound, so I was wondering if the python community has any plans to not do that any more ?