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What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

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Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#61

Post by mewpmewp2 »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #25
onion2k wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the quality of your randomness. If it's a person picking the number that definitely isn't a 1 in a million chance for most numbers. You need to get pretty specialized hardware before you can confidently say it's definitely an equal chance for every number every time.

I think true randomness was implied in GP’s comment. A person picking a number “randomly” from a million is not random in the mathematical sense.

There's no evidence of true randomness though. There's only evidence of us having missing information to do the prediction of what any RNG would offer us next.

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#62

Post by sd9 »

pitdicker wrote: post #51
sd9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The chance for a CC2 building (apartment buildings, offices, hotels etc.) is defined as moderate with 0.03 Does this mean 3% or 0.03%?

If a CC2 building collapses, the expectation is that in only about 3% of the cases this leads to someone dying. I don't know the complete reasoning, but can imagine some factors of why this number is far below 100%: a building is not always in use, there are often warning signs with time to escape, and collapse can be localized (not the whole building).

Makes sense, so this is confounded by the number of people in the building.

30% for a CC3 seemed high to me initially (hence wondering if 0.3 really meant 0.3%). But since it actually means "in 30% of structural failures in CC3 buildings (e.g. a stadium), at least one person dies", it make much more sense because there are probably lots of people in the stadium.

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#63

Post by Tade0 »

Scarblac wrote: post #19

> "Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten." -- Terry Pratchett Making fun of the fact that if someone says "it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!" in fiction, you know it's going to work. In _Guards! Guards!_ this is taken to the point that…

They had a point there, even if not realising it, as that world's rules conform not to regular physics but the general population's beliefs.

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#64

Post by shawabawa3 »

OJFord wrote: post #40
appstorelottery wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Royal flush in poker is more like 1 in 6493. ;-)

How did you get there? GP is talking about being dealt it, I think you've calculated the chance of it occurring in a round or something? Wikipedia has GP's at 649739, so yeah 'almost' a million, roughly speaking. 4 / ((52 nCr 5) - (4 nCr 1)). (Four suits, one way to do it in each suit, deck of 52, five card hand.)

In games where hands are made from 5 out of 7 cards (e.g. texas hold'em), the odds are 30,939:1

I can't think of any common form of poker where it would be ~6000:1

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#65

Post by strken »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #57
Recursing wrote: post #50

Reminds me of https://markxu.com/strong-evidence «One time, someone asked me what my name was. I said, “Mark Xu.” Afterward, they probably believed my name was “Mark Xu.” I’m guessing they would have happily accepted a bet at 20:1 odds that my driver’s license would say “Mark Xu” on it. The prior odds that someone’s name is “Mark Xu” are generously 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio of me…

Someone offering that bet though would also alter the odds though. Because why would someone offer such a ridiculous bet after you've told your name, unless they had special information about your name? Although it being a possible YouTube prank channel would make it also possible that you actually have a chance to win for the reactions.

This is part of a very important principle: if someone approaches you about something, you should be far more suspicious than if you had randomly picked someone off the street.

The most well known application of this is teaching kids to ask a random shopkeeper for help if they get lost, but to not get in a stranger's car when offered a lift.

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#66

Post by esrauch »

Sebb767 wrote: post #43
Toutouxc wrote: post #22

> If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years, then 1 in 6 times 4.0 million = 24 million babies will someday be President. This sentence desperately needs parentheses. Took me five minutes to parse correctly.

To save some time for the rest of us: > If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years, then [1 in (6 times 4.0 million =) 24 million] babies will someday be President.

I prefer the interpretation of an ominous prediction that the presidency will be filled by 24 million babies someday soon.

Switzerland does have a committee of 7 people as president, only a small step from that to 24 million babies.

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#67

Post by bongodongobob »

austin-cheney wrote: post #37

I used to tell people I was an order of magnitude more likely to die from a traffic related accident driving to work than from any hostile action during the two years I was in Afghanistan. People seemed challenged by that.

Probably because they are different time frames. Your chances of dying in Afghanistan are over say a 4 year period. When someone says you have a 1% chance of dying in a car accident, that's spread over a lifetime. The chance of someone dying in a car accident in that 4 year period is much lower.

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#69

Post by nine_k »

Tainnor wrote: post #47
kortilla wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don’t need specialized hardware. The output of a modern hash for crypto absolutely needs to produce a uniform distribution across a million.

Technically, it's not actually uniform, or "random" - it only has to be indistinguishable from random, e.g. if you had access to a true random source and a pseudo-random one, it should be computationally infeasible to distinguish them.

Given a finite amount of sample.values, you can always find a polynomial to match the values.

You can only proclaim that something is "truly random" on epistemological grounds, assuming that true randomness is somehow exposed by the universe. This holds under quantum physics, but not under classical mechanics. Unless there is some quantum effect, RNGs based on fluid dynamics, like lava lamps, may be completely deterministic, we just don't know how to set their initial conditions precisely enough.to reproduce a phase trajectory.

Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

#70

Post by fenomas »

strken wrote: post #65
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone offering that bet though would also alter the odds though. Because why would someone offer such a ridiculous bet after you've told your name, unless they had special information about your name? Although it being a possible YouTube prank channel would make it also possible that you actually have a chance to win for the reactions.

This is part of a very important principle: if someone approaches you about something, you should be far more suspicious than if you had randomly picked someone off the street. The most well known application of this is teaching kids to ask a random shopkeeper for help if they get lost, but to not get in a stranger's car when offered a lift.

> One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider.

(Guys and Dolls)

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