4 ms·
I'm looking at the first 100,000 digits of pi. Lo and behold, 00000 shows up once. So does 11111. What are the odds of each of those happening? It's 1:100,000!
by GCA10 6y ago
I'm looking at the first 100,000 digits of pi. Lo and behold, 00000 shows up once. So does 11111. What are the odds of each of those happening? It's 1:100,000!
Absolutely astonishing.
As an aside, the inevitability of weird flukes in large sample sizes really sinks in if you've ever wasted part of a year multi-tabling online poker. You'll see some hands play out in totally WTF fashion, as 1:100 and 1:1,000 probabilities come good.
The lesson, of course, is that when you play thousands of hands, encountering such oddities with your money at stake is no longer nearly impossible. It's moved into the zone of nearly certain.
- rrobukef 6y agoAssuming pi is normal, the odds are 59.3% for any run of 5. The odds of two specific runs of 5 in 100,000 digits is (rough guess) between 3.5% and 10%.
- idolaspecus 6y agoThis snarky response unfortunately misses my point, and your point is trivial to anybody who has taken even a remedial course in probability. The key detail is that we know the "RNG" in question might be flawed. If I tell you I implemented a RNG and you run it and find that it imediately spits out the ASCII codes for DONTBEADOUCHE in binary, you might rightly assume you've been duped.