SteveMartin wrote:
The totally wonderful thing about random numbers is that no matter how much you study and analyze and try to find a pattern, the next number generated may NOT be what you have predicted. Now of course, if you are trying to predict te outcome of a six sided die roll, you have a one in six chance of being right each time and absolutely NO chance of being right every time.
Actually, the point of statistics is not to predict the exact outcome at each iteration, but rather to minimise the error of such prediction. This is why the average is also called expected value. If the dice are unbiased, I shall predict that the result will be 3.5: I will never be correct, since 3.5 is not an allowed result, but I will very likely make a smaller mistake than the one made by someone predicting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6.
The time spent analyzing such nonsense would be better spent in moaning and whining about the scoring bugs and how they affect your stats, or perhaps even better, by playing more games and sucking up the occassional nasty die roll.
Awww, but it's fun! |