On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 4:28 AM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > If my previous post didn't convince you, consider an even simpler random > distribution: tossing a fair coin. The probability of getting a head is > exactly 1/2 whether you toss the coin once or a thousand times. But if you > toss the coin once, your chances of getting "no heads" is 1/2. If you toss > it a thousand times, your chances of getting "no heads" is 1/2**1000.
Although... purity and reality do sometimes disagree. The concept of "independent events" says that if I toss a coin 99 times and it comes up heads every time, the probability that it'll come up heads again the hundredth time is still 50-50. But the reality of cheats coins says that the chances of the coin being a fair one and having been tossed 99 times and come up heads every time is one in 1<<99, and given that the mass of this planet is roughly 6E27 grams, that would mean that you'd need about a thousand earths' worth of coins to get that many... so the chances are much better that you're looking at either an imbalanced coin or a crafty operator, and the probability is much higher that it comes up heads :) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
