GoldSim Model Beauty Contest Winner: Moneyball!

Posted by Rick Kossik

A tradition at our User Conference is to hold a "Model Beauty Contest".  The Beauty Contest is held at the end of the Conference, and is intended to allow our users to focus on the fun side of modeling and simulation.  Beauty Contest entries typically describe a modeling application that is light-hearted (such as a game), amusing (e.g., probabilistically simulating the length of the restroom lines at a football stadium), or simply entertaining. This year's winner (as determined by a vote of attendees) was Joe Donnelly's "Moneyball" model.

Playing Mastermind with GoldSim

Posted by Ryan Roper

This last weekend, I went into nerd mode and created a GoldSim version of the classic game Mastermind. If you're not familiar with Mastermind, here's the Wikipedia article about it: Mastermind (board game). According to the article, "Mastermind...is a code-breaking game for two players. The modern game with pegs was invented in 1970 by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert. It resembles an earlier pencil and paper game called Bulls and Cows that may date back a century or more." I play this game with my kids and it often leaves me musing about what kind of strategy or algorithm I might devise to more systematically make guesses to solve the code. This musing usually lasts about 5 or 10 minutes before I decide it's not worth my time and I go on with my life. However, recently I thought it would be a fun and interesting exercise to create a GoldSim version of Mastermind.

Simulating a One-Armed Bandit

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

If you ever run into GoldSim employees in Las Vegas, you will never see them sitting in front of a slot machine. Dealing with probabilities on a daily basis gives us a feel for our odds when dealing with uncertainty. But what if we built a model that only simulates the one-armed bandit? This is the question I asked myself the other day when Rick mentioned the dice-rolling model. What I thought would end up to be a mere exercise in probabilities ended up in a little game that is almost as addicting as solitaire!