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Re:Intriguing new result from the LHCb experiment at CERN by leereeves on Sunday March 28, 2021 @08:39PM (#26616446)
In a normal distribution, about 3 out of 1000 values will be over 3 sigma just by random chance.

How many measurements do they make at CERN? They probably see random 3 sigma measurements fairly often.

Re:Intriguing new result from the LHCb experiment at CERN by PartiallyTyped on Sunday March 28, 2021 @08:59PM (#26616574)
That's the reason it is expected to have 5 sigma, so that anomalies are extremely rare. The more experiments one makes, the closer one gets to the mean value and this happens exponentially fast. By that, I mean that using some probability theory and some algebra you can get a confidence bound on the accuracy you demand based on the number of experiments that you run.
Re:Intriguing new result from the LHCb experiment at CERN by jampekka on Monday March 29, 2021 @05:00AM (#26619024)
I think this happens sublinearly w.r.t sample size.
Re:Intriguing new result from the LHCb experiment at CERN by PartiallyTyped on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:33AM (#26620127)
I would like to point you towards Hoeffding's inequality. The probability of deviating more than epsilon from the mean after n experiments is exponential in n.
Re:Intriguing new result from the LHCb experiment at CERN by leereeves on Monday March 29, 2021 @08:16AM (#26620452)
I think you're talking about different things.

For a fixed range, the probability of being outside that range decays like 1/k^n.

But for a fixed probability, the width of the range with that probability decays like 1/sqrt(n).