How does a game of pool work?
KneadToKnow’s money example is actually pretty good if it’s developed a little more.
The rules are as follows…
Every time you bump into someone, you have to give them half your money.
The more money you have, the faster you have to walk around the room.
In the ice cube example, you have a dozen people standing around with $0 and a dozen people with $64 running around the room. If two people with $64 bump into each other, they swap $32, still have $64, and so continue on at their same pace. If a $64 person bumps into the “ice cube” he gives them $32 and gets nothing in return, He’s got $32 and slows to a walk. The $0 person now has $32 and starts walking. Now you’ve got two $32 people walking, 11 $0 standing around, and 11 $64 running. Because of the way he was facing, the former $0 (now $32) immediately walks into another $0… so they both end up strolling off with $16. A 64 runs into one of the 16s and they part their ways speed walking with $40 each. You’ve got 10 $0s standing around, 1 $16 strolling along, 1 $32 going for a walk, 2 $40s speedwalking, and 10 $64s running. Keep doing this long enough and you’ll eventually end up with two dozen people walking around with $32.
How do you cool off soup? Well… those soup simulation guys think they’re all real smart and note that the rules say “when you bump into someone give them half your money” and insist that just because some other knucklehead bumps into them it doesn’t mean they’ve bumped into someone. They have all these really arcane rules for when people collide to determine who bumped into who and by how much and how much money each party has to hand over. The main jist is that if somebody hits you from behind they bumped into you
Anyway. You’ve got a room of soup simulation guys who, on average, have $64, but because of their interpretation of rule 1, some are sprinting like crazy and some are just tottering along. Luckily for the sprinters they collide with people more often and since they’re running so fast almost nobody can catch up to hit them from behind, so it’s almost always the case that they bump into someone else and can slow down to rest after they hand over the money.
Doors open on either end of the soup simulation room and a line of guys with $16 start strolling through from one door to the other. Since they’re all going the same speed and direction, they tend not to bump into each other. In fact most of them get to the other door without colliding with anyone at all.
Since the really fast soup guys bump into people more often, they’re usually the ones that hit the strollers. Occasionally a stroller might run over a soup simulator just tottering along, or a stroller might hit a soup guy from behind and the soup guy just runs off with his money, but for the most part you have a soup bumping into a stroller (who then starts walking and bumps to the stroller in front of him, then they’re both walking a little faster until the front guy bumps into the next guy and slows down and so on). It’s a real mess, but they keep walking towards the other door and out of the room. The soup guy that started it all is, of course, off running around the room again.
Net effect is that the richest/fastest soup guys tend to bump the strollers and the strollers just take any money they may get with them out the other door. Because the average soup guy is has $64 and the average stroller has $16, it’s pretty rare for a stroller to hit a soup simulator from behind, but it still happens from time to time with some of the slower soup guys.