Heuristics that almost always work

Re:Heuristics that almost always work by wizzwizz4 on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @07:45AM (#30271961)

You forget: once you roll three 6s in a row, you're dead, and you don't roll any more. Your expected calculation assumes that people keep rolling after they get 666.

Though I'm not sure where they got their figure from, because there isn't an “expected time to live”; there's a 90% probability to live time, a 5% probability to live time…

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Re:Heuristics that almost always work by Someone on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @08:26AM (#30272338)

There’s a difference between expected value of number of days you’ll survive and the number of days a given fraction of the subjects will survive, but I don’t see either supporting the claim “If you do it every day, you have about 15 months to live”.

  (215/216)^450 ≈ 0.124

, so about one in eight will survive for 15 months or more. The “5% probability to live” time is around day 645 (about 1¾ years):

  (215/216)^645 ≈ 0.0501

the “half will survive at least for” point is around 5 months:

  (215/216)^149 ≈ 0.501

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