Re:The gambler's fallacy is not a fallacy?
by foerbert on Monday April 11, 2022 @08:30PM
(#30997082)
Probably, yes. But it's not a guarantee until you include infinity. And that's the important distinction here.
Without any such guarantee of the larger result, all you have is a 50/50 chance for the next flip. With infinity, you can pick out a portion of the sequence with an unusual number of Tails and expect there to be an offsetting number of Heads elsewhere in the full (infinite) sequence.
This is wrong. It takes considerably fewer flips than "infinity" to see distinct convergence here.
If the coin is truly even - you have a binomial distribution, and the probability that you are far out to either edge of that distribution (nearly all heads, or nearly all tails) is vanishingly small with just 1000 flips.