4 ms·
My assumption was that each number should have an equal distribution over time, so anything that did not had a higher likely hood of being chosen. I feel like
by patio11 11y ago
My assumption was that each number should have an equal distribution over time, so anything that did not had a higher likely hood of being chosen.
I feel like saying Gambler's Fallacy to someone who knows what R is is borderline aggressive but, out of a maximum of good intentions, the thing you've labeled as an assumption is called the Gambler's Fallacy and it is so named because statistics does not work that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
Consider the case of a fair coin. We agree that, if one flips a sufficient number of coins 100 times, eventually one of them will come up with 100 heads, right? Pretend you've got a factory in China filled with people flipping fair coins until one station shouts out "GOT IT!"
Do you think that there's some property that the universe attaches to that coin which makes it more likely to be heads, or more likely to be tails, simply because it "feels" anomalous if one happened to be flipping only that coin and not one of the thousands being flipped simultaneously in the factory?
No, that's preposterous. The universe doesn't care what feels anomalous to us. It's a fair coin. The next shot is like every other shot: 50/50.
- tmaly 11y agothanks Pat, like I said I do it for fun sometimes.
- possibleNoob 11y agoThere have been other lotteries which were pseudo random and were statistical won because the assumption "the coin is fair" was incorrect.
- an4rchy 11y agoAlthough I agree with what you're saying in principle, there could be other (highly unlikely) aspects to it. What if the coin had a small aberration due to the manufacturing process or it was dropped one too many times, this could lead to some sort of unfair odds. Once again, this is definitely a reach, (maybe not the universe attaching a property to something but just bad manufacturing processes or too much wear etc)
- spdustin 11y agoBack in middle school, I did a science fair project on this for the Florida lottery. My hypothesis was that each ball was dropped into air-blown hoppers made by the same manufacturer to the same specifications, and each ball had slight variances in weight and aerodynamics due to the (assumed) pad printed numbers on the balls; thus, the "hot numbers" were statistically more likely to be drawn. EDIT: also, the hypothesis included the average amount of time the balls were being tumbled before drawn. It was, to my middle school statistical ability, correct at that time (ca. 1980s). The "hot" numbers "won" me over $3,000 over the course of two months. Random numbers? About $20. Things have very likely changed since then, though.