Love the ingenuity and thought put in to this, however it only applies to white elephant exchanges done by computers.
People do not make the same decisions as a program, and will often make choices such as stealing a gift to troll a friend, or letting someone keep a gift they actually want to steal because they think it’s the nice thing to do.
Also, almost every white elephant I’ve ever been involved in has a steal limit - either per gift or per person - which completely throws these results off. This limit is usually because one or two gifts are often universally seen as ‘good’ with the rest seen as jokes or fillers (ref. the scary accurate white elephant episode of The Office with the iPod).
> Also, almost every white elephant I’ve ever been involved in has a steal limit - either per gift or per person - which completely throws these results off.
The rules used for the simulations in the article included a limit of 3 steals per item.
People do not make the same decisions as a program, and will often make choices such as stealing a gift to troll a friend, or letting someone keep a gift they actually want to steal because they think it’s the nice thing to do.
Also, almost every white elephant I’ve ever been involved in has a steal limit - either per gift or per person - which completely throws these results off. This limit is usually because one or two gifts are often universally seen as ‘good’ with the rest seen as jokes or fillers (ref. the scary accurate white elephant episode of The Office with the iPod).