Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Entropy says it's special. If you have a million dots and 10,000 coordinates, you have 10,000 ways for all the dots to land in the same coordinate, and a zillion kavillion stupillion ways to have somewhere near 100 dots in each coordinate.




No, if its randomly distributed then every specific configuration has the same exact chance of happening.

I am laughing at all the people coming out of the woodwork to reply to my original post in this thread misunderstanding randomness and chance.

If you flip a coin a million times and it lands on head every single time, the millionth and 1 time still has a 50/50 chance of landing on heads


> every specific configuration

Who said anything about specific configurations?

We started this talking about whether things "clump" or not. The result depends on your definition of "clump" but let's say it involves a standard deviation. Different standard deviations have wildly different probabilities, even when every specific configuration has the same probability.

Nobody responding to you is calculating things wrong. We're talking about the shape of the data. Categories. And those categories are different sizes, because they have different numbers of specific configurations in them.

> the millionth and 1 time

I don't see any connection between the above discussion and the gambler's fallacy?


No, because most likely the coin wasn’t a fair coin then, or there was some other bias going on

Im talking about true random. If you believe there is a bias, then you dont believe its a random selection



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: