Hi all

At Logica we often participate
in different events where employees compete to see who rides their bike more often
to work, who walks the most steps in a month, and so on. After a month of competition,
we end up with a spreadsheet, where I may have walked 180.000 steps, but my colleague
Henrik only walked 78.000 steps (He is kind of a wimp 🙂 )

So lets say that we want to give a prize to one of us, and Henrik should have a chance
of 78000/(78000+180000) (30,23%) of winning and I should have a chance of 180000/(78000+180000)
(69,77%) of winning. As the number of points and the number of contestants get bigger,
this becomes increasingly difficult to manage.

Therefore, I have written a small winforms program, that helps you manage this. You
can add as many contestants as you like, and give them points. If you are only interested
in a “normal” draw, you can just give all contestants one point.

Screen shot:

eliasen.eu.draw.screenshot

The program not only does the draw, it will also:

  • Give you an overview of the contestants, their points and their chance of winning,
    which is dynamically updated each time a contestant is added

  • Give you the opportunity to simulate any number of draws, to ensure that the program
    is random. When doing the simulation, the percentage of wins by each contestant is
    shown next to the chance of winning, so they can be compared.

I will gladly take comments, bug reports, suggestions, postcards, et cetera 🙂

The documentation can be found at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx#documentation and
the program can be downloaded at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx#winform.

I hope this comes in handy to someone.



eliasen