Simulating talent versus luck

Remember that claim about luck being more important for success than talent, which I had a lot of issues with ?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/WzQ3Awo8vC3

I decided to take a bash at reconstructing the simulation in Python. The code is really trivial, an evening's work. I see there are several online editors that let you do fancy stuff like plotting and whatnot, but I don't have time to do that right now. Here it is in public domain anyway. It seems to be giving reasonably similar results to the original, though I haven't checked everything with terrible thoroughness. Interestingly, if the method of estimating lucky events is slightly wrong, the effects can be quite dramatic. Not sure why the original authors chose such an odd random-walk method, but it makes a difference.

I liked the conceptual idea and methodology of the original study but the more I think about it the more I think this is just too simple to apply to the real world. As a first step, what I'd like to do is have talent generate some more reliable income, which is a bit more like how it works in the real world, and deliberately tweak this to reproduce the original result of a power-law wealth distribution. The reason for this is that's what the original result essentially does regarding luck : there was no way it could fail. I don't want to say that the original study wasn't a good idea, just that it's incomplete and the conclusions overstated. But that's for next week, or whenever.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zsAI1gLq5e6E7toSh5cTzXXb0cqxjimn