a programming bug with weird consequences

One student of mine coded by mistake an independent Metropolis-Hastings algorithm with too small a variance in the proposal when compared with the target variance. Here is the R code of this implementation:

#target is N(0,1)
#proposal is N(0,.01)
T=1e5
prop=x=rnorm(T,sd=.01)
ratop=dnorm(prop,log=TRUE)-dnorm(prop,sd=.01,log=TRUE)
ratav=ratop[1]
logu=ratop-log(runif(T))
for (t in 2:T){
  if (logu[t]>ratav){
    x[t]=prop[t];ratav=ratop[t]}else{x[t]=x[t-1]}
  }

It produces outputs of the following shape
which is quite amazing because of the small variance. The reason for the lengthy freezes of the chain is the occurrence with positive probability of realisations from the proposal with very small proposal density values, as they induce very small Metropolis-Hastings acceptance probabilities and are almost “impossible” to leave. This is due to the lack of control of the target, which is flat over the domain of the proposal for all practical purposes. Obviously, in such a setting, the outcome is unrelated with the N(0,1) target!

It is also unrelated with the normal proposal in that switching to a t distribution with 3 degrees of freedom produces a similar outcome:

It is only when using a Cauchy proposal that the pattern vanishes: