Resource Library

The following applet allows you to simulate the Shannon experiment, an experiment aimed at determining the entropy of an English letter (the amount of information in bits that we obtain on the average when we learn one letter of English). The simulation will calculate the amount of entropy for you when you are finished guessing the letters.

This applet doesn't have more explanation than - Let's Make a Deal II- An applet to demo at the UCLA conference. It has statistics for a number of tries at a time with choices for whether or not the host knows what is behind the door and whether or not the contestant switches doors after primary choice.

This is a collection of applets including Let's Make A Deal, Let's Make a Deal II, Monkey Words, Entropy, Vigenere, Rectangular Transposition, and Monoalphabetic Substitution.

This page has links to an explanation of the applet and to the applet itself. It is a simulation of the T.V. game show. There are three doors to choose from and after making a choice, one of the other doors is revealed. The player can choose to pick the other unopened door or stay with their original choice. Afterwards the statistics of previous contestants are shown. (Note: the applet statistics are inaccurate)

This applet allows you to experience the fate of a gambler by simulating the whole gambling session in a matter of seconds. The applet plots the successive rises and falls of the capital during the whole duration of the game. It also displays the maximum and minimum values attained by the capital during the session and allows you to get precise information (by clicking at a point of the histogram) of the amount of capital after that particular bet.

This applet is a probabilistic study of picking prizes from an unlimited supply of cereal boxes. The applet helps to answer how many boxes of cereal need to be purchased to have a 50/50 chance of getting all the prizes.

This applet is a probabilistic study of picking fortunes from a limited supply of fortune cookies. The student will try to answer how many cookies he/she has to eat to have a 50/50 chance of reading all the fortunes.

This site offers a collection of applets in which standard topics of statistics and probability are presented in a novel and visual way using computer animated images. Topics include dependence, independence, conditional probabilities, expectation and variance, normal, exponential, Poisson distributions, law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, hypothesis testing maximum likelihood estimation, sampling, chi-square tests, and the construction of confidence intervals.

This is the description and instructions as well as a link for the Forest Fires and Percolation applet. It builds a background with a "hands-on" activity for the students which then leads to the applet itself. The applet is a game where the object is to save as many trees from the forest fire as possible. It shows the spread of a fire with the variable of density and the probabilty of the number of surviving trees.

This site provides the description and instructions for as well as the link to The Self-Avoiding Random Walk applet. In the SAW applet, random walks start on a square lattice and then are discarded as soon as they self-intersect. If a random walk survives after N steps, we compute the square of the distance from the origin, sum it up, and divide by the number of survivals. This variable is plotted on the vertical axis of the graph, which is plotted to the right of the field where random walks travel.