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Why the downvotes on onion's comment? I don't see anything factually incorrect about it.
by fexl 13y ago
Why the downvotes on onion's comment? I don't see anything factually incorrect about it.
- sp332 13y agoThe odds are 1.3×10^-23 times the number of times anyone has attempted it, so there's no reason to believe that it has ever happened.
- maxerickson 13y agoRight, if you enumerate a million possible combinations the answer is still that it is unlikely that any of them have ever come up. If you enumerate all the possible combinations then of course one of them has come up.
- thisone 13y ago"a million-to-one chance succeeds nine times out of ten" - Terry Pratchett
- cma 13y agoThe fact that if you don't chose what you are looking for, any sequence you come up with is rare, isn't news. Since they specified a sequence, all heads, you can say it has probably never happened, even while acknowledging that a minute fraction of the various possible (but individually just as rare) sequences have happened.
- benched 13y agoNo, the sense of the comment is completely wrong-headed with respect to probability. The probability that a sequence occurred is 1. The probability that the 10-10-10.... sequence mentioned has occurred is indeed as close to zero as the 76 heads.
- mistercow 13y agoThe factually incorrect part is the hidden premise that "convinced that X has never happened" is equivalent to "assigns P(x) = 0". In fact, it is equivalent to "assigns P(x) = epsilon", where the number of possible sequences is several orders of magnitude greater than 1/epsilon. It basically comes down to saying something like this: 1. 1/x ≈ 0 for very large x 2. x0 = 0 for all x 3. So x1/x ≈ 0 for very large x 4. But x/x = 1 Therefore 1 ≈ 0 This reasoning is correct, but the error tucked away in that last "≈" is exactly 1.