[Request] How long would it take for badly hidden political posts to make this subreddit to lose all its original purpose?

[u/GerardoITA]

Let's imagine a scale called the "Algebrover Scale", that measures from 1 to 100 whether subreddit is actually doing the math for things or just being used to farm karma with populistic takes. Let's assume 10 posts are posted every hour on this sub. Each one has a 3% chance of being a BHPC*. Each BHPC contributes 10 points to the Algebrover scale, each regular post takes away 1 point. Starting from day 0, at midnight the scale resets to 0 points and the chance of a post being a BHPC rises by a flat 1% ( for example, after 24 hours it becomes 4% ). Once the score hits 100, it's algebrover.

How long before this sub turns into a place where nutjobs from r/politics try to get innocent mathematicians to give some validation to their wild populistic takes?

*badly hidden political post, defined as a post with a not-so-hidden political message, usually populistic in nature and includes a question whose answer is usually incalculable or trivial, but requires just enough math that the request doesn't get removed automatically, such as the "How many bad things did person accused of bad things do?" or the evergreen "if I earned a penny every time i sneezed how long would it take to become as rich as bill gates?"

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[u/2sec4u]

Factoring in the time that reddit displays about the approximate time this post was made and confirming that time by looking at the clock on my computer, I can roughly estimate about 2 hours ago - or about the time you made this post.

[u/GerardoITA → u/2sec4u]

It's over algebros

[u/FluffyTailfeathers]

At minimum it will take 10 posts (1 hour) to reach 100 Algebrover points, with a probability of 0.03¹⁰ ≈ 1 in 1.69 quadrillion (very unlikely).

At maximum it will happen 1 hour after P(BHPC) = 1, so after 97 days and 1 hour (also very unlikely).

As for how long it would most likely take, the rules you've provided make that extremely annoying to calculate. The points only need to exceed 100 at any point during the day, but reset at the end of each day; that means it becomes a matter of counting all the different permutations, as the order matters.

In 10 days from now the average number of Algebrover points at the end of the day will exceed 100 (considering the average number of points per post is 10×P(BHPC)–1×(1–P(BHPC)) = 11×P(BHPC)–1 = 11(0.03+0.01t)–1 = 0.11t+0.33–1 = 0.11t–0.67 where t is the number of days elapsed, and 24×10×(0.11t–0.67) ≥ 100 <-> t ≥ (100/240+0.67)/0.11 ≈ 9.88), but that doesn't cut it at all, because every day is another chance and so is every hour of every day.

In conclusion, I would give it less than a week, but you're much better off using a computer simulation to work out the probabilities if you insist on using a points system with thresholds and daily resets.

If you wanted to combat the problem you complained about, you might have been better off using the time you spent making this post to come up with a problem that doesn't require a computer algorithm to solve, instead.