What does randomness look like?

Re:What does randomness look like? by orangecat on Friday December 21, 2012 @10:10PM (#4955632)

So, I did a quick bit of math. You can pull one piece every hour for two weeks, but sleeping, not playing, missing days etc, meant that I effectively pulled ~100 pieces. The chance of missing a certain piece is 7/8, so missing a certain piece 100 times in a row is (7/8)^100, which is roughly a little bit more than one in a million.

The chance of failure would be 8 times that much because there are 8 pieces you could miss, which comes to about 12.7 per million.

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Re:What does randomness look like? by fmx on Saturday December 22, 2012 @02:12AM (#4956034)

You couldn't possibly miss all 8 pieces. As soon as you make one attempt you'll get one piece.

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Re:What does randomness look like? by Zakharov on Saturday December 22, 2012 @02:42AM (#4956078)

Henrik's math calculated the chance of missing the "I love you" piece each time. The chance of missing any one other piece each time is the same.

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Re:What does randomness look like? by martincmartin on Monday December 24, 2012 @02:34PM (#4963839)

Yes, but they're not independent. Given that you missed piece X, the probability that any one piece it's piece Y it's 1/7, not 1/8, so the chance of missing both X and Y it's lower than the product of their individual probabilities.

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Re:What does randomness look like? by vacri on Saturday December 22, 2012 @05:54PM (#4957770)

'missing each of 8 pieces individually' is not 'missing a certain piece'.

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