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A comment on Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving dollars to random others. Parent comment

Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by joe_the_user on Sunday July 09, 2017 @11:30PM (#14733201)
With participants able to go into debt indefinitely, the process becomes a random walk.

The result should be each participant being up or down from 0 at a rate of proportionated sqrt of t, the number of iterations of the system. Implying a wealth distribution which would become ever-more skewed over time.

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Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by lmm on Monday July 10, 2017 @05:41AM (#14734535)
Is that what "skewed" means? To my mind a widening bell curve which remained symmetric (which is what we're talking about, right?) would not be "skewed".
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Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by joe_the_user on Monday July 10, 2017 @03:15PM (#14738792)
Over time, the average participant would have either far more coins in credit than they began with or be in debt for far more coins than they started with.

Whether you have what statistician call "skewed" or not, you have what most people would call skewed, unequal, extreme.

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Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by Bartweiss on Monday July 10, 2017 @11:04AM (#14736532)
"Varied" or "widely distributed" seem like better terms. To my mind, "skew" is what we have in the original problem (with a zero-bound) - it only describes asymmetric distributions.
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