shelled and riddled

Consider a shell game with three shells and a ball with The Riddler constraint that the location of the shell with the ball is always exchanged with the location of an empty shell, randomly chosen. If one starts with the ball as rightmost, what is the distribution of the location of the ball after N steps?

Running an exploratory R code like

o=rep(0,3)
for(n in 1:1e6){
  b=c(0,0,1)
  for(t in 1:N){
    i=sample((1:3)[!b],1);b=0*b;b[i]=1}
  o=o+b}

shows that the difference in probability is between the rightmost position and both others, starting at zero, and evolving as p⁺=(1-p⁻)/2, with the successive values 0,1/2,1/4,3/8,5/15,11/32,… Very quickly converging to 1/3.

Bayes on the Beach

This year, the now traditional Bayes on the Beach conference will take place in Surfers Paradise (Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia) on 25th – 27th November. The conference provides a forum for discussion on developments and applications of Bayesian statistics, and includes keynote presentations, tutorials, practical problem-based workshops, invited oral presentations, and poster presentations. The keynote speakers are Nial Friel, Renate Meyer, Antonietta Mira, and Sudipto Banerjee, Registration is open.

lazy ABC…what?!

positions at QUT stats

Chris Drovandi sent me the information that the Statistics Group,  QUT, Brisbane, is advertising for three positions:

• Professor in Statistical Data Science (Remuneration package from $AUD206,729 per year)
• Lecturer in Statistical Data Science (Remuneration package of $AUD108,796 to $AUD129,209 per year)
• PhD Scholarship in Computational Bayesian Statistics ($AUD35,000 per year tax-free for 3 years, with an additional $AUD5,000 per year for project costs)

This is a great opportunity, a very active group, and a great location, which I visited several times, so if interested apply before October 1.

Bayes on the beach [and no bogus!]

Bayes on the Beach is a yearly conference taking place in Queensland Gold Coast and organised by Kerrie Mengersen and her BRAG research group at QUT. To quote from the email I just received, the conference will be held at the Mantra Legends Hotel on Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast during November 7 – 9, 2016. The conference provides a forum for discussion on developments and applications of Bayesian statistics, and includes keynote presentations, tutorials, practical problem-based workshops, invited oral presentations, and poster presentations. Abstract submissions are now open until September 2.