3 ms·
Doesn't the book example need to factor in the book length? If you read 20 pages, and it's 20 pages long, you should be 100% confident, but if you read 20 pages
by nitwit005 8y ago
Doesn't the book example need to factor in the book length? If you read 20 pages, and it's 20 pages long, you should be 100% confident, but if you read 20 pages and it's 5000 pages long, your confidence should be near 0.
- madrox 8y agoNot in this case, because the probably being estimated is "the chance a single page could contain a typo" and not "the chance the rest of the book could contain a typo." To do the latter, you'd need to know the length of the book, yes.
- c3534l 8y agoLogically not, since your sampling method is imperfect and will not detect all typos and, in fact, some typos might make perfect sense given the context and be inherently undetectable forever.
- ezzaf 8y agoIn effect it does. If you have read 20 pages and found no typos you estimate the chance of an unknown page having a typo is 1 in 20/3. But if there is 0 unread pages then there 0 cases to apply the probability to. Make it 100 pages, then you have 100 cases each with a 1 in 20/3 probability. Of course if you read 30 more and still don't find a typo, it's now 50 remaining cases each with a 1 in 50/3 (estimated) probability.