burli wrote:The mushroom spread and death ABM has an interval of 11 seconds and a chance of 50. Does that mean each mushroom will spread/die in an average time of 550 seconds?
no, it means that ever 11 seconds, 1 in 50 mushrooms will spread/die.
So logically, this means that after 22 seconds, there will be a small chance that the same mushroom will spread again if it didn't die, but most likely one of the other mushrooms gets picked (49 out of 50 chance).
So after 33 seconds, most likely (48/50) it's a different mushroom, and 2/50 chance it's a previous mushroom.
But since some of them may have died, the chance fluctuates
And so on. The chance is really hard to predict. This is the problem with trying to estimate binomial distributions.
Let's take a simpler example:
100 leaves. every 1 second there's a 1/2 chance the leaf decays.
after 1 second you have probably 50 leaves left
after 2 seconds you have probably 25 leaves left
after 3 seconds you have probably 13 leaves left
after 4 seconds you have probably 7 leaves left
after 5 seconds you have probably 4 leaves left
after 6 seconds you have probably 2 leaves left
after 7 seconds you have probably 1 leaves left
how many leaves do you have left after 8 seconds? Could be 0, could be 1. You don't know.
Now let's look at the average number calculation:
average = 50 * 1 + 25 * 2 + 13 * 3 + 7 * 4 + 4 * 5 + 2 * 6 + 7 + 9 / 100 (assuming the last one took 2 tries)
average = 2.15
Now, this is just pure luck that it pans out this way. If I redo the experiment 10 more times, I might get answers that wildly vary, since the chance that at the first second exactly 50 decay is common, but not that common. It's highly likely that the number varies quite a bit.
TL:DR; You can't just multiply the numbers, lots of factors account and may influence the result. Conduct experiments multiple times to get an idea how the numbers work out in reality instead.