Discrete Probability Distribution Type as a Monad

Before we get going on this lesson, you might want to refresh your memory of what an additive monad is.

Additive Monad

Briefly, an additive monad is a monad where there is a “zero value”; like the number zero, “multiplying” by zero produces a zero, and “adding” a zero is an identity.

For example, the sequence monad, IEnumerable<T>, has a zero: the empty sequence. If we Select or SelectMany from the empty sequence — our analog of “multiplying” — we get an empty sequence. If we concatenate an empty sequence onto another sequence — the sequence analog of “adding” — we get the original sequence.

All additive monads can have a Where function defined on them; if we wanted to implement Where for sequences and didn’t care about performance, we could implement it like this:

public static IEnumerable<T> Single<T>(T t)
{
  yield return t;
}
public static IEnumerable<T> Zero<T>()
{

...