10-03-2003, 02:59 PM
Streaks are actually in complete accordnace with laws of probability. If you never got them (or very seldom), THEN one should start to wonder about the randomness.
I recall reading a story about a professor in statistics who would give his students a home assignment. They should all go home and toss a coin 200 times and write down the result. Obviously, some students would simply skip actually tossing the coin and instead write down what they thought would be a random sequence of coin tosses. It was almost always possible to catch those students. Why? Because they lacked long streaks of the same result. Now, I don't recall the exact probabilities (nor do I want to calculate it now), but tossing a coin 200 times, means that there is an EXTREME high chance that you will get like 5 or 6 results of the same type in a row. You will also get several of 4 in a row and so on. However, most humans trying to write a "random" sequence of coin flips, will avoid even such things as 4 in a row thinking it is too unlikely and not random enough.
A nice story about how bad humans are in predicting and judging probabilities and what is probable and not and what is common occurance in random effects.
I recall reading a story about a professor in statistics who would give his students a home assignment. They should all go home and toss a coin 200 times and write down the result. Obviously, some students would simply skip actually tossing the coin and instead write down what they thought would be a random sequence of coin tosses. It was almost always possible to catch those students. Why? Because they lacked long streaks of the same result. Now, I don't recall the exact probabilities (nor do I want to calculate it now), but tossing a coin 200 times, means that there is an EXTREME high chance that you will get like 5 or 6 results of the same type in a row. You will also get several of 4 in a row and so on. However, most humans trying to write a "random" sequence of coin flips, will avoid even such things as 4 in a row thinking it is too unlikely and not random enough.
A nice story about how bad humans are in predicting and judging probabilities and what is probable and not and what is common occurance in random effects.
There are three types of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can't.