On 2015-06-17 00:45, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
Ned Batchelder wrote:
On Tuesday, June 16, 2015 at 6:01:06 PM UTC-4, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
wrote:
Your programmatic "proof", as all the other intuitive-empirical "proofs",
and all the other counter-arguments posted before in this thread, is
flawed. As others have pointed out at the beginning of this thread, you
*cannot* measure or calculate probability or determine randomness
programmatically (at least not with this program).
You *can* estimate probability with a program, which is what is happening
here.
No. Just no.
I repeat: Probability is what relative
frequency (which you can measure) *approaches* for *large* numbers. 100
is anything but large, to begin with.
The number of trials in this program is not 100, it is 1 million. You
seem uninterested in trying to understand.
It still would _not_ a measure or a calculation of *probability*. So much
for “uninterested in trying to understand”.
What is "large" depends on the experiment, not on the experimentator.
And with independent events, the probability for getting zero does not
increase because you have been getting non-zeros before. It simply does
not work this way.
Again, if you look at the code, you'll see that we are not talking about
the probability of getting a zero on the next roll. We are talking about
the probability of getting no zeros in an N-roll sequence. I have no idea
how you have misunderstood this for so long.
You do not understand that it boils down to the same problem. The
probability of only having sons is _not_ greater than that of having
sons and one daughter or vice-versa. And for that it does _not_ matter
how many children you have *because* it does _not_ matter how many
children you had before. The probability for a boy or a girl is *always*
the same. You are _not_ due for a boy if you have many girls, and not for a
girls if you have many boys. But that is precisely what your flawed logic
is implying.
Learn probability theory, and use a dictionary in Python when you want to
count random hits.
I think that different people are talking about different things in
this thread. You're talking about the probability of each event, while
everybody else is talking about the probability of certain combinations
of events.
If you have, say, two children, the possibilities are:
boy, boy
boy, girl
girl, boy
girl, girl
The probability of each boy or girl is 1/2.
The probability of only boys is 1/4 and of a son and a daughter is 1/4
+ 1/4 = 1/2.
Therefore, the probability of having only boys is less than the
probability of having a son and a daughter.
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