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>For instance, Mechem's sniffer dogs have displayed a 90% success rate on target filters, so statistically having three dogs per team perform cross-checking pat
by gabemart 14y ago
>For instance, Mechem's sniffer dogs have displayed a 90% success rate on target filters, so statistically having three dogs per team perform cross-checking paths on the field should produce the 99.6% confidence level for the type of mines the dogs can detect.
I know nothing at all about this area, but presumably this only works if the 10% failure rate is random rather than based on some quality of the undetected mines?
- T-hawk 14y agoMore generally, that the chance of each dog X failing to detect each mine Y is independent. If it is independent, then you get the (1-P)^3 chance of failure, meaning 0.1% for all three failures if each dog has a 90% chance of succeeding. But of course that isn't true in reality. There will be properties of the mines (burial depth, ground cover, degree of leakage of sniffable explosive material) that affect its chance of being found by all dogs searching for a mine. If you wanted the parent poster's statistical chance, you'd want three 90% ways of detecting mines that are truly independent. Perhaps a dog, and infrared imaging sensitive enough to detect the explosive material (I have no idea if that's possible), and this article's mechanism.
- _djo_ 14y agoCorrect, that's why in real world scenarios companies like Mechem will use a number of techniques. The link I posted earlier makes it clear that the UN considers a combination of techniques necessary to meet the required standard.