I used to play Drug Wars on my calculator in high school. It was a really fun game, and I'm surprised it hasn't made it into the iPhone app store yet. Maybe because it's all about drugs.

I was thinking about this a few months ago. You could adapt the game to Color Wars--it'd be just as fun with the added bonus of way cooler graphics. Imagine the context is a world devoid of bright colors, and each drug is instead a color. It could look something like the food fight in Hook.

I'm a little surprised such rudimentary math made it to the front page of Hacker News (at #2 even). Maybe it's time to pick a FP language and make posts about it all day, to scare some people away?

I agree, this math is terrible. Just. Terrible.

Please no one believe this post, it uses dubious statistics.

it depends on your assumptions. i updated some of the numbers, but if you have suggestions definitely feel free to add a comment.

Sorry to be so harsh, but this analysis is really lacking.

If you want to learn more about how to hedge bets, read about things like moment theory or the Kelly criterion.

Also, taking a measure like variance would be much more meaningful than just the spread of the payoff.

i went into it thinking the game used an algorithm of some type and i was surprised to find how simple it was. definitely not complex, mostly simple arithmetic.

Plus with coke, the buzz is fairly short compared to the other listed drugs so your users will be wanting more sooner.

i think a more realistic algorithm would detect how much coke is sold in a city, increase the demand+price appropriately based on some type of addiction multiplier, as well as increase the amount of police.

There are some inaccuracies when it comes to the relative drug prices. They got the general picture right (coke most expensive, heroin in between, weed on the bottom) but some price comparisons are a bit inaccurate (shrooms < weed).

I used to play that game on my Handspring all the time. Geex I feel old suddenly.

I thought drug dealing cost money?

Isn't that why they have to subsidize it with pirate videos - at least thats what the ad at the cinema said,