Bruce Ellis wrote:
If you stopped to pick up the penny you'd get hit by lightning and
fail to cash in your lottery ticket while getting bitten by a moose!
But thank god, there would be no collision. I hate getting hit by cars.
Paul
brucee
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:45 AM, Paul Lalonde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You don't have to care about the chance of a collision. Work out the
expected value of the collision by estimating the maximum that might
cost you. I'll go nuts, and claim that a collision will cost *one
BILLION* dollars.
Not checking for a collision, assuming a 2**-90 collision rate (which is
a huge over-estimate, but that I've seen bandied about here), you wind
up with an expected dollar cost of 2**-60 dollars on that collision.
I don't pick up pennies in the street. I certainly won't dedicate any
more brainpower to this silliness.
Paul
Enrico Weigelt wrote:
* Bruce Ellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
it's even sillier, if everyone bought 1,000,000 times as many tickets
guess how that would change the probabilities. not at all!
The main problem is: statistics is not reliable. You just can
guess how many times approx. something will happen if you take
a really large number of tries. You can never be sure for a
single case.
cu
