Wrath of Dagon

Name me another even that happened that had 100 trillion to one odds. But regardless, whatever makes you feel better.

I didn't say you would win in this situation. I'm trying to illustrate that the odds of a specific person winning are less than the odds of someone in the group winning. Edit: What I'm trying to say is that for all practical purposes they can't happen. To repeat once again, if something can only happen once in a trillion years, you're will not ever see it happen. If you don't believe that, there's nothing more I can say to you.

Actually what you said are the same thing. It's actually the difference between a pre-selected person winning and anyone in the world winning. Let's say you and your 9 friends have to pull out a correct card. You each have 1/5 chance of success. The chances that any one of you gets the correct card are a lot higher than that it's specifically you that gets the correct card.

OK, what the MH problem illustrates is that people are used to thinking about probabilities of random independent events. They get confused because in this case the events (which door has what) are not independent since MH knows which doors have the goats and acts accordingly. Edit: A simple way to explain it is that MH not opening your door tells you nothing, since he's not allowed to open the door you picked. However, his not opening the other door makes it more likely that the car is behind that door, since he's also not allowed to open the door with the car, so that's the door you should pick.

I don't see how anyone can say that having bad things happen to oneself gives a license to somebody to victimize someone else.

Did you play it on hard? Because most of the time I survived exactly two hits out of cover.

Are you talking about the gambler's fallacy? What mathematicians and statistians are clueless about it?

I'm calculating orders of magnitude, not exact numbers. So for a specific person to win 4 times over a period of time in which she spent an amount of money y playing would be approximately 16 million to the fourth power divided by y. The chance of someone winning once we know is 1. The chance of someone winning twice has also been calculated previously and it amounts to someone winning every few years, and that's where the y divisor comes in. So now that only leaves the 16 million squared term, which is what I used. I'm willing to concede I could be off somewhat in this reasoning, but in any case it comes out to a huge number against anyone in the world winning 4 times.

Given Dagon's comments of: "After that, the chances of one of the double winners winning again twice is 1 in 100 trillion, which is clearly impossible," he's stating that the odds of winning two more lotteries, after winning two previous ones, is somehow lower. What he is basically saying with his statement is that, if you flip 4 coins, if the first two are heads, the probability of the next two being heads are less than what they actually are. In more layman's terms, he stated that the odds of these two coin flips being heads is less than 0.25. No, the reason it matters that she already won twice is because at the start you have the entire pool of everyone in the world who plays the lottery who can potentially win once. But when you only count people who already won twice, you only got a handful of people who potentially could win the third time. Sure, the odds of a particular person in the pool winning are still the same as the first time, but now you only got a handful who can win at all. Well, I assumed there's only a few people who've won twice, let's call it x, so the odds of one of them winning twice are approximately 16 million squared divided by x.

Exactly, and she won 4 times, so that's what you have to calculate. Also you can't confuse the odds of a particular person winning, and the odds of someone in the world winning. And no, I don't think there are any mathematicians here. And yes, I did take the average amount spent by people who won once into calculating the odds of one of them winning the second time. I don't think you'd take that into account for the 3rd and 4th calculation because the total odds are only divided by that number once.

Her chances of winning again are 1 in 16 million. Her chances of winning 4 times are 1 in 100 trillion. The only reason it's not surprising she won the first time is because someone has to win. It's not surprising the second time because there are thousands of lottery winners spending thousands of dollars to play lotteries, so one of them will win again every few years. After that, the chances of one of the double winners winning again twice is 1 in 100 trillion, which is clearly impossible.

I was first in my college probabilty class. Of course you were. I'll bet that college also taught creationism as a core component of its biology degrees. No, it was the university that invented nano-technology. And yes, I know infinitesimal means the value of a variable as it approaches 0. I was using the term in the colloquial sense of very close to 0, as pointed out previously. And Balthamael, your math is completely wrong, I'm too lazy to go into why. Normally the chances of winning the lottery are about 1 in 16 million, from that the chances of someone winning 4 times is about 1 in 100 trillion. Remember, she's not the only one who's playing the lottery, and all we need are the chances of someone winning 4 times in one of the lotteries in the world over a period of a few years say, not necessarily this particular person. Btw, I guess there's also the possibility that the story is a hoax to start with.

I find it exceptionally surprising that I have to explain the obvious. This thread is like trying to give a math lecture in an insane asylum. No wonder the West is in decline.

What you guys seem to fail to understand is that a probability infinitesimally close to 0 is functionally equivalent to 0. Think of the rounding error in the 100th place. The odds say it was impossible for her to win, yet she won. Hence the conundrum. Saying "BY CHANCE" explains nothing.

What about that claim? I was first in my college probabilty class. It's obviously the dope that's interfering with any logical thinking on your part.

I'm saying that something happening once in a trillion trillion years (or more closely trillion trillion trillion trillion years in this case) is functionally equivalent to never happening.

I didn't commit any logical fallacy. I said something that's extremely unlikely to happen will not happen. Some sequence of cards being drawn isn't unlikely, it has a probability of one. A particular sequence of cards that's predicted ahead of time will never happen, nothing said here changes that.

What earlier claims? I wasn't trying to support my earlier claims, I already explained those. I was answering other posts, which happen to be irrelevant to the subject at hand.

My point is you can not predict what sequence has been drawn, because the odds of any particular sequence are extremely low. Edit: In other words, the probability of some sequence being drawn is one, so of course some sequence being drawn will occur. However, the probability of any particular sequence being drawn is infinitessimally small, so drawing 100 Aces or any other sequence you'd care to predict ahead of time will never (or in a trillion trillion years) occur.

No one's ever drew 100 Aces though.

OK, everything you say is true, but what does it prove exactly?

Your analogy is wrong. This isn't about drawing any sequence of cards, it's about drawing a pre-determined sequence of cards.

I just calculated it, assuming the computer can do it 1 billion times per second, it would take 9.6e+47 years (47 0's), so I was a bit low with my thousand year estimate.

Yes, I already said it's not septillion for those reasons. It's still in the trillions though. It's pretty hard to believe we have randomly witnessed an event that only occurs once in thousands of universe lifetimes. If people would rather believe that than a supernatural explanation, it's up to them of course. I'll say that an undetected scam is the far likelier of the alternatives, but I don't believe that explanation in spite of the statistical evidence for it. Edit: If I wanted to do it I would write a program that deals cards like Calax described many times every minute and see how long it takes for the same combination to come up - but that's really irrelevant. The fact is that just because, as I have said, the chances are low it doesn't mean that something can not happen. It will likely not happen, you could say with almost full certainty it would not happen, but that does not mean that it could not happen. Yes, but your program may have to run for over a thousand years, that's a huge number we're talking about.

Try it then, it will never happen, I'm quite confident.