Back to Alice's Auction (Reach version)

After going through Kathryn “Blondiebytes” Hodge’s “Ten Days of Blockchain” video tutorial twice (following along the second time), I’m back to the Reach version of “Alice’s Auction” (this time with a fighting chance of understanding what I’m looking at. :thinking: :thinking:

I’ve managed (with some help on the Reach Discord) to dope out that the new bid gets transferred from the new bidder into the contract implicitly in the PAY_EXPR of the parallelReduce, while the previous bid (if any) gets returned to the previous bidder explicitly in the CONSENSUS_EXPR of the parallelReduce. (Although . . . does the “require(bid > currentPrice)” in the CONSENSUS_EXPR stop the aforementioned implicit transfer in the PAY_EXPR if it fails?)

I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the front-end (index.mjs):

  1. I see that, in three different runs of the program, the bidders act in what appears to be a pseudorandom sequence. Yet the only call to Math.random I see is for the bid amounts. How is this happening?

  2. I also see that each bidder is “deciding to bid” some random amount exactly once. This would seem to simulate not a “live auction,” but a “single round of sealed bids” auction. Am I understanding this correctly?

If you don’t get an answer here, you can try to ask the questions (referencing this post) on the Algorand Discord (Algorand) or the Reach Discord (https://reach.sh/).