Posted by:
rwoodyer
at Fri Apr 15 01:01:13 2005 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by rwoodyer ]
>>You mentioned the coin flip analogy. You said that if you flipped a coin a hundred times, you'd get approximately 50 heads...now imagine this scenario. If you did flip the first fifty flips, and happened to get 50 heads (unlikely, I'll admit, but not impossible, right), then your thinking would assume the next flip has an extremely high probability of being a tails....when in fact the next flip still has an exactly 50/50 chance of being heads or tails....
Unfortunately your odds of getting heads fifty times in a row are not unlikely, but actually 1 in a million billion (literally 1.126 x 10^15). You cannot use probability to predict a single coin flip, but you can use it to guess the *approximate* number of heads or albinos you would get. In this case, the more snakes you have the closer and closer you will get to exactly 50%. So out of 100 eggs you can estimate that about 50 will be albino. Period.
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RE: Again at the heart of the problem.... - rwoodyer, Fri Apr 15 01:01:13 2005