BBall Letter 1 to Dr. Michael W. Ecker

To: Dr. Michael W. Ecker                               1993-09-08
    REC, 909 Violet Terrace, Clarks Summit, PA 18411

From: Harry J. Smith, 19628 Via Monte Dr., Saratoga, CA 95070

Enclosures: DOS disk with this letter and 8 BBall programs.

Dear Mike,

I have written a program to compute the probability that baseball team 1 will beat team 2
for the division title, assuming each has a 50-50 chance of winning any given future game.
It uses a bivariate binomial distribution as a model.

The inputs are:

          GL1 = Games Left to play, 1st team
          GL2 = Games Left to play, 2nd team
          GE  = Games to play each other
          GA2 = Twice games ahead = 2 * GA, 0, 1, ...

The outputs are:

          GA  = Games 1st team is ahead. 0, 0.5, ...
          MNT = Magic Number to tie
          MNW = Magic Number to Win
          P   = Probability that 1st team beats 2nd team
          Q   = Probability that 2nd team beats 1st team
          1/Q = 1 / Probability that 2nd team beats 1st team

I have written and compiled 8 versions of the program. They all do the same thing, but are
written in different languages. It was originally developed in Turbo Pascal 5.0 in the summer
of 1989 when the Giants were beating the Padres in the National League West. My interest
was aroused again this summer with the Giants and the Braves fighting for the division title.

I have a friend who prefers his programs written in C, so I converted it to C for him. My
interests have been in C++ lately, so I converted the C version to C++. I thought it would
be neat if it could run as a MS Windows program, so I converted it to C++ for Windows.
I know your interests are in BASIC, so I converted it, first to QBasic without line numbers,
and then to GWBasic with line numbers. You might think that this was quite enough, but
I remembered that I had a FORTRAN compiler and an ADA compiler that I have not used
for a while, so I converted the program to these languages also.

We now have:

          BBallP.Pas    BBallP.Exe   : Pascal version
          BBallC.C      BBallC.Exe   : C version
          BBallCpp.Cpp  BBallCpp.Exe : C++ version
          BBallCpW.Cpp  BBallCpW.Exe : C++ for Windows version
          BBallQ.BAS    BBallQ.Exe   : QBASIC version
          BBallB.BAS    BBallB.Exe   : GWBASIC version
          BBallF.FOR    BBallF.Exe   : FORTRAN version
          BBallA.Pkg    BBallA.Exe   : ADA version


Sincerely,



Harry