Statistics 101

The Legends of the Five Rings roleplaying game uses this system*, plus other combinations of dice rolled/dice kept, indicated by k notation, where something like "4k2" means roll four dice, keep the results of two and add them together.*well, they did in first edition. Second edition used a different system, and then the property was turned over to Wizards and redone for D20 System.

The Legends of the Five Rings roleplaying game uses this system*, plus other combinations of dice rolled/dice kept, indicated by k notation, where something like "4k2" means roll four dice, keep the results of two and add them together.*well, they did in first edition. Second edition used a different system, and then the property was turned over to Wizards and redone for D20 System.

I ain't confused, I was the one who wrote that original quote. I am glad you proved it for me. It was nator who got all upset whenever I said that.Let me ask you a question.
If the chances of winning the lotto are 146 million to 1, and you play the lottos 146 million times, playing each combination, what are the odds of winning? What about if you play the same number for 146 million times, what are your odds of winning?
This is for the given amount of tries, not infinity.

If you mean for one draw - i.e buying 146 million tickets in one week, and picking every possible number, then the probability is theoretically 1 (practically slightly less for all the usual caveats, acts of God, etc) i.e. play one ticket with the same number for 146 million weeks?Eaxactly the same as if you randomly picked your numbers each week, or counted through the numbers sequentially, or any other method whatsoever. And the answer is 0.632 (3sf)

Welp, 145 million is a big number to work with. Let's do the analogous situation in coin tosses.What are the chances of getting a head if flip a coin twice? This is easy: you take all times you get a head in the series (HH, HT, TH), and divide by the number of total outcomes (HH, HT, TH, TT). So you get .75. This is also the same thing as taking the number of ways you wouldn't get head a subtracting it from one.So for the lotto situation, what are the chances of not winning each time? It would be 144, 999, 999/ 145,000,000. Then you raise this to the power of 145,000,000 and you get .36788. (1-.36788)=.63. So the chancs of winning after that many trials is 63%.No matter what combination of numbers you play, the odds of losing are the same for each trial so it shouldn't matter if you play the same numbers each time or different numbers.

Well, technically, the original quote was a little wonky. Your odds of winning the lottery were always 1 in a million. You said those weren't your odds, but they were, and that will never change. My original response to that was just to clear up the tense difficulties, but crashfrog got all bent out of shape about the mood.

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What about if you play the same number for 146 million times, what are your odds of winning?
This is for the given amount of tries, not infinity.

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What are your odds, in a fair toss, of coming up heads in one coin toss?What are your odds for each fair toss for 5 coin tosses?What are your odds for each fair toss for 100 coin tosses?You haven't actually answered this question yet, Rat.

I think you are confused. The prior probabiltiy of you winnign remains unchanged (as I kept pointing out in the discussion wiht Crashfrog). While it is true that the conditional probability of you winning given that the numbers drawn match your ticket it really doesn't mean much (Crash was right about that much).So my reply in Message 6 stands. Your argument only makes sense if you are claiming that the fact of winning is sufficient to prove that the lottery was rigged in your favour. But that is not true - see my Message 70 for elaboration on that point.

Your still stuck in past tense, I have never denied the possible combinations in the lotto.I don't see how anyone could figure out the odds for the question you quoted.You could play the same number in the lotto for 146million times, and never win.

Maybe you don't see but it can be done in a reasonably straight forward manor. Yes and you can calculate the odds of that happening as well.

Why? That's exactly what the mathematics of probability allow us to do. These are trivial questions to which the answer is obvious, if you've had just the least instruction in this field.But I think your response displays a characteristic mindset - "I don't know it; therefore, it's impossible for it to be known." It's the failure to accept that there's such a thing as expertise.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Chiroptera Absolutely. The qualifying word here is were. However when you say the odds of the ticket that won are 1 in whatever then you cannot be correct since the field of probability is the study of the chance that a particular event or series of events will occur.

Assuming that each combination is the same as a "number", you will have the same statistics each and every time you play. If you don't win, your pick is one of the 146 million. If you do win, your pick becomes the one out of 146 million.I suppose that we could say that there are 146 million and one chances to win!

By my calculations when you have played 100 million times (same number or not) your odds of winning reach close to 50%. If you play the other 46 million times your odds of winning get to be amost 2 out of 3.But you have a bit more than a 1 in 3 chance of still not winning.

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I don't see how anyone could figure out the odds for the question you quoted.

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The odds are very, very, VERY simple.I'll post them again, and I will highlight some words that, if you think about why they are highlighted, might serve as a hint to the solution.