2 ms·
No the cluster size isn't fixed, nor is the event rate — the clusters are chosen purely based upon what an "unusually long" time between events would be. That'
by 3JPLW 7y ago
No the cluster size isn't fixed, nor is the event rate — the clusters are chosen purely based upon what an "unusually long" time between events would be. That's precisely how the rate ends up canceling itself out. Given this formulation, the expected cluster size is always e, regardless of how you define celebrity. That's what makes it fun.
Now the human psychology part that this doesn't cover is that typically when you have two or three A-listers die, well, then you start seeing all the B- C- and D-listers that also died in the same period that you would have otherwise ignored.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- emerongi 7y agoCan you calculate the chance of the cluster size being >5 when we can cluster events within a one-week period and the rate of events is one every 2 months (debatable, but feels right to me)? I think that would just end this discussion. I don't know how to calculate that, but my intuition says the resulting chance is low.
- appleiigs 7y agoI don't know how to do the math, but my python simulation says zero. import random service_providers = 20 servers_threshold = 5 up_time_threshold = 0.999**7 # prob down in week years = 20 occurrences = 0 # run sim 10,000 times for i in range(0, 10000): servers_down = False # simulate weeks in 20 years for j in range(1, 52*years): how_many_down_this_week = 0 # run up times for service providers for s in range(0, service_providers): up_time = random.random() if up_time > up_time_threshold: how_many_down_this_week += 1 # did they go down? if how_many_down_this_week > servers_threshold: servers_down = True if servers_down == True: occurrences += 1 print(occurrences)
- joshuamorton 7y agoGiven those parameters, you'd expect to see something every 100,000 years or so. (poisson distribution, lambda=1/8, k=5, the result is like 7e-7).