ABSTRACT
ACT Wc ticscribe a, computer experiment to study the waiting times between the first occurrences of rare values in a sequence of intlepc:ndent, identically distributed random variables taltiiig positive integer values. The experiment proceeds in two stages; the first stage requires detailed sirimlation and lasts only until all the alternatives that havc substantial probabilities have occurred. In the second stage, we generake only the times when potentially new, mre values c m occur. That stage allows 11s to look effectively and efficie~ltly a.t millions of trials. While the proposed rnctllodology is general. we report some findings only Sor prevalence distributions with a geometric tail.
