In today’s Programming Praxis exercise, our goal is to simulate the well-known birthday paradox. Let’s get started, shall we?
Some imports:
import Control.Monad import Data.List import System.Random
A single run consists of assigning each person a birthday (assuming they are distributed uniformly throughout the year) and checking whether there are any duplicates.
paradox :: Int -> IO Bool paradox n = fmap (\g -> or [elem h t | (h:t) <- tails . take n $ randomRs (1, 365 :: Int) g]) newStdGen
Determining the chance that a given population shares a birthday is a matter of running the test a large number of times and returning the percentage of cases in which a birthday is shared.
trial :: Int -> IO Float trial = fmap ((/ 100) . genericLength . filter id) . replicateM 10000 . paradox
We have to run the test for a group of 23 people (50% chance) and 57 people (99% chance).
main :: IO () main = do print =<< trial 23 print =<< trial 57
A random trial run produces 50.38% and 99.03%, respectively, which are close enough to confirm the birthday paradox.
Tags: birthday, bonsai, code, Haskell, kata, paradox, praxis, programming
