At 08:45 AM 8/19/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
..
(I strongly urge you to actually do this experiment. Really. These are the
experiments which teach probability theory. No amount of book learning
substitutes.)
Yep. I've often thought that one benefit to playing RPGs when I was
younger was directly observing lots and lots of rolls of various kinds of
dice. That gives you an intuition for how unlikely things can happen
sometimes, for the difference between very unlikely and impossible, etc.
So the coin has been tossed twice in this particular experiment. There is
now the possibility for equal numbers of heads and tailsbut for the
second coin toss to give the opposite result of the first toss, every
time, to balance the outcomes, the coin or the wind currents would have
to conspire to make the outcome the opposite of what the first toss
gave. (This is so absurd as to be not worth discussing, except that I know
of no other way to convince you that your theory that equal numbers of
heads and tails must be seen cannot be true in any particular experiment.
The more mathematical way of saying this is that the outcomes are
independent. The result of one coin toss does not affect the next one,
which may take place far away, in another room, and so on.)
In fact, I believe this is the trick that makes it very easy to distinguish
between sequences of coin flips that really happen, and ones that are made
up by a human. The human tends to try to make things even out over time.
--Tim May
--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
